It felt strange, having a getting-to-know-you talk with someone whose birthmarks I could locate with my eyes closed (one directly over his left hip bone, one on his right elbow), whose whole life story I already knew, whose hopes and dreams I’d once found impossible to separate from my own.
“But you make a lot of money, no?” he pressed on playfully. He turned his attention back to the road and darted in front of an old pickup truck, whose driver leaned out the window and unleashed a string of expletives and hand gestures, which only made Francesco laugh. He glanced back at me. “You are rich?”
I rolled my eyes. “Hardly. I’ve just been good with saving my money. How about you?”
“Am I rich?” Francesco asked in obvious amusement. “Is that what you ask me?”
“No! I meant, what’s your job? What are you doing these days?”
“Ah, my job,” Francesco said. He stroked his chin with his right hand thoughtfully, as if this was a question that needed to be mulled over. “This is an interesting thing, bella. I do a lot of things. I paint a little. I do, how you say, handiwork? Yes, handiwork.”
“Handiwork?” I stared at him in confusion.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Like that character on your TV show. Desperate Housewives. Eh… Mike Delfino?”
He pronounced the character’s name slowly and respectfully, as if talking about a real, revered individual. I had to laugh; like many Romans, Francesco had always been enamored with American pop culture.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re a handyman?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. He was distracted again as he shot through a spot between two cars and zigzagged into the right lane. “I fix things. You know. Wires. Pipes.”
“But what happened to your job as a computer engineer?”
He glanced at me, and I thought for a moment that I saw something like annoyance flash over his face. “That job, it was not for me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Obviously, the pain from losing his job was still fresh.
He blinked a few times and changed the subject. “And you? Where do you live?”
“New York,” I said.
“Oh, New York! I visited New York six years ago. I love it. The Big Apple!”
I stared at him. My mouth felt dry. “You were in New York?” I said slowly. “Why didn’t you call?”
He glanced at me sharply. “I did not know that is where you live.”
Now I felt confused. “You didn’t? But I always lived there. Remember? I told you it was the only place I ever wanted to be, because my family was there.” Surely he’d remember that from all of the times we’d lain in bed talking about our future and our past.
“Ah, yes,” Francesco said vaguely. “I remember now.” He paused and cut the wheel sharply, sending us shooting off the road on a side street to the right. I grasped the door handle for dear life. Seeing this, Francesco laughed. “Relax, bella. It is the way we drive here.”
I was being reminded of that quickly enough as Francesco wove in and out of side streets, cutting other people off, being cut off, slamming on his brakes, and cursing in rapid Italian approximately every forty-five seconds. How had this not bothered me more when I lived here?
But then, as we shot off a side street, lurching onto a main drag, I recalled immediately why the erratic driving of Romans hadn’t bothered me as much as it should have. It was because the town they drove through like maniacs was so ridiculously, achingly beautiful that one could hardly blame them for wanting to race from one beautiful spot to the next.
I sucked in a deep breath as the Tiber and its beautiful, arching bridges stretched out ahead of us. The afternoon light gave a soft, milky glow to the ancient buildings across the Ponte Garibaldi, and the sun seeped through their arches and crevices, caressing them with its rays.
I felt suddenly like I was home.
“I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here,” I murmured.
Francesco glanced at me. “Ah, yes? Yes, it is beautiful. A little bit of colpo di fulmine for you, no?”
“Colpo di fulmine?” I repeated.
“Love at first sight,” Francesco said, pulling up to a stop sign and turning to stare at me meaningfully before lurching the car forward again.
He cut another hard right and we whizzed past a rectangular piazza, presided over by a hulking statue of a stern-looking, hooded man who looked like a monk.
“Campo dei Fiori,” Francesco announced like a tour guide as he saw me straining to look. “Remember?”
I nodded, wishing we hadn’t just shot by it at the speed of light. But, I reminded myself, I’d be here for a whole month. I’d have plenty of time to visit my old haunts.
Francesco turned down a side street, then down a narrow alley, and screeched to a halt in front of a building painted a faded rust-orange color. “Here we are,” he said after parallel parking. “Home.”
Home. The word lodged itself in my mind.
Francesco hopped out of the car and, ever the gentleman, came around to open my door. He grinned and held my arm gently as I stepped onto the sidewalk.
“Grazie,” I said with a smile.
“Prego,” he replied with a wink. “So you speak Italian now?”
I laughed. It had been a joke between us that summer that even though I had taken two semesters of Italian and was studying in Rome, I was horrible at speaking the language. Two semesters of college Italian were barely enough to get down the basics, never mind verb conjugations and sentence construction. So I could say all kinds of useless words—mucca for cow, mela for apple, finestra for window—but as much as I loved the way the words rolled off my tongue in that smooth Italian staccato that made you want to gesture with your hands, they didn’t do me much good.
Understanding Italian was a different story. My mother had, of course, been born in Italy, so like Francesco, she peppered her English with Italian words and phrases. I remembered sitting at the kitchen table many times as a child, coloring pictures or eating apple slices with peanut butter while I listened to her rapid-fire telephone conversations with her parents and sister. I worshipped her then and used to ask her to teach me words in Italian. So she did, patiently some days, with impatient agitation on others. By the time she left, I could understand a good 50 percent of what she said, although I wasn’t capable of repeating most of it.
It was during one of those phone conversations that I’d heard her say she was leaving. I was so sure I’d misunderstood that I never said anything to my dad, or to her. And then, a week later, she was gone. I’d always felt guilty for having advance notice and failing to stop her—even if I hadn’t been sure. To this day, I’d never told anyone.
Francesco grabbed my suitcase out of the trunk and pointed toward the door of the burnt-orange building. “This way,” he said. “Up those stairs.”
I nodded and set off up the stairs with Francesco following close behind me. I wondered if he was checking me out from behind. Granted, I didn’t have the same body I’d had at twenty-one. But I wasn’t bad for a thirty-four-year-old woman, all things considered. I hoped Francesco agreed.
Four flights up, we stopped at a door just off the landing, and Francesco set my bag down while he fiddled with his keys and inserted one in the lock. He pushed the door open and gestured for me to step inside.
Even though it was a different apartment than the one he’d lived in thirteen years ago, a wave of familiarity washed over me as I walked through the door. It was a studio loft, much like Francesco’s old place had been, and I was moderately surprised to see the same worn leather sofa, the same cream-colored throw rug, the same wrought-iron coffee table, and the same dented wooden kitchen table that I remembered from his old place. It even smelled like him; the faint smell of cigarette smoke mixed with a touch of Trussardi cologne. I breathed in deeply, loving the way the scent transported me back in time.
The floor of his new apartment was mostly a glossy, brick-colored tile with a small rug separating the living room from the rest of t
he small apartment. A small TV sat on a wooden stand opposite the old leather couch, and a sturdy wooden ladder was propped against the loft, where I could just glimpse the end of a bed covered in a navy comforter. The kitchen was tiny and clean, but I guessed Francesco didn’t use it much; I remembered him eating out most nights and complaining that he wasn’t even capable of cooking spaghetti correctly. The counter was lined with a dozen bottles of chianti, two tall bottles of Campari, and several bottles of Piper-Heidsieck champagne. Francesco had been cheap in many areas, but never with his alcohol; he drank only the best. Sunlight poured in through a narrow pair of French doors just off the living room.
Francesco followed my eyes to the patch of sunlight and smiled. “That’s why I rented this appartamento,” he said. “The terrazzo. Wait until you see it.”
Francesco gestured toward the French doors and I walked toward them to peek out. He came up behind me, and touching my waist lightly in a way that sent tingles shooting through me, he opened the doors to the terrace.
I stepped outside and breathed the ash-scented Roman air in deeply, falling in love immediately with the view, as he must have the first time he saw it.
The terrace was longer and wider than I would have expected. It had two dark green reclining chairs and a small table between them, on which sat a pair of overflowing ashtrays. A few steps away, a wrought-iron railing separated us from a steep, four-story drop down the side of the building. But it was the sun-soaked view over the edge of the rail that made my breath catch in my throat.
The scene was nothing extraordinary, and perhaps that’s what made it so beautiful. It was exactly the Rome I remembered and missed every day. A cobbled street below gave way to several cream-colored buildings roughly the same height as Francesco’s. Windows were open across the small piazza, and flowers in all colors spilled out of rust-colored window boxes and pots balanced haphazardly on windowsills. A block down, a partially obscured dome rose up from behind another apartment building, its rounded, slate-colored top glowing in the afternoon sun and ending in a narrow cross. Below, I had no doubt, Catholics had worshipped for centuries. Perhaps my mother’s grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents had even knelt beneath it. The sense of being steeped in history—not just textbook history, but the history of the people themselves—was one of the things that I’d always loved most about the Eternal City.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Francesco said. He had come up behind me as I stared out on the cityscape. He was holding two drinks in his hand, both of them clear, bright red concoctions on ice, with thin, floating slices of orange.
“It is,” I said. I glanced at the drinks. “A spritz?” I guessed.
He nodded, handing me one. “Sì, naturalmente. Cin cin.”
It was the Italian toast I remembered so well. I clinked his glass, looking into his eyes, then I took a long sip of the drink. It was a Venetian classic that had become popular in Rome in recent years: two parts prosecco, two parts soda water, one part Campari or Aperol Bitters, served over ice, with a sliver of orange just to sweeten it a bit. It had always been the drink Francesco served, along with a small bowl of potato chips, on the afternoons when we’d sat by his window, trying to catch a breeze, in the deepest days of that stiflingly hot summer.
“The river and the Ponte Sisto are just a hundred meters that way.” Francesco pointed after he’d taken a long sip. He smiled at me. “Sometimes, I go run by the river now.”
“You run?” I asked, incredulous. Francesco had always prided himself on being a couch potato who stayed in shape only because he worked hard on the weekends, helping friends lift furniture, mowing his mother’s lawn outside town, hiking with his buddies in the hills nearby.
He smiled. “A lot has changed.”
I nodded. “But a lot has stayed the same, too.”
Francesco furrowed his brow, then nodded. He turned away and looked out over the city. Then he turned back to me. “So. Shall we go to dinner after you freshen up?”
Francesco led me back inside, brought me a towel, and led me into the bathroom, where he turned on the shower for me, explaining that sometimes it was tricky to get the temperature just right. I loved the feeling of being taken care of by someone else for once, even if it was something as simple as someone turning on the hot water for me.
I rinsed off quickly, washing away the remainder of New York from my skin while I quickly sudsed my hair with the bottle of Joico shampoo I found lying on the edge of the tub. I wondered for a moment, with a pang of jealousy, if it belonged to a girlfriend of Francesco’s, someone else who had shared his bed much more recently than me. I had to remind myself that I had no right to be jealous; I was the one who had walked away so many years ago, and I had certainly dated since then. Besides, he was with me now, wasn’t he?
It took me about thirty minutes to blow-dry my hair with the travel dryer I’d brought (complete with a voltage converter plug) and slap on some tinted moisturizer, cheek stain, and a swipe of mascara—my quickest get-pretty routine. I’d have more time to dress up later, but tonight, I wanted to look effortlessly pretty and casual, like I wasn’t trying too hard.
When I stepped out of the bathroom in a pale pink sundress with a white cardigan thrown jauntily over my shoulders, Francesco was sitting on the couch, one leg crossed over the other, reading a book. He had changed, too, into inky blue jeans that were nearly black and a gauzy white shirt that he left unbuttoned almost to the middle of his chest, exposing his sleek, tanned muscles and a little chest hair. I swallowed hard. He was gorgeous.
He looked up and smiled.
“You look beautiful,” he said. “Shall we go?”
I nodded and let him take my hand as he crossed the room toward the door. I didn’t know where the evening would lead, but I had the feeling that it would be a decisive step away from my life of safety and security in the States. New York and all my responsibilities there felt far, far away as we stepped out the door into the twilight and headed off down the street, where all roads led to Rome.
Chapter Seven
After a stroll around the neighborhood, down to the river, up the Via Arencia toward the Pantheon and back over toward the Piazza Navona through a series of side streets and alleys, Francesco led me to a quaint, brick-walled restaurant just off the busy tourist square on a street tucked away behind an apartment building whose facade was crumbling, exposing worn, chipped brick underneath.
We’d run out of things to talk about by the time we reached the restaurant, which was more than a little worrisome. How had we both been able to sum up the events of the past thirteen years so quickly? Surely more had happened to us than that, but I found that once I’d skimmed over what was happening with Becky and Dad, what had developed with my job, where exactly I was living and a brief, undetailed list of the major relationships I’d had since I left Italy, I was out of things to say.
Similarly, Francesco seemed at a loss after telling me that his mother was still living outside the city, that his sister, Alessandra, had moved to Venice and had fallen in love with a gondolier (a big scandal, apparently), that he had decided to leave his computer programming job to go out on his own and start a handyman business, and that he hadn’t dated anyone for more than a few months since me. So we sat through our antipasto course in awkward silence, commenting only about the food and the wine, which I noticed both of us were drinking quickly.
Sure enough, two glasses of chianti and fifteen minutes later, I was feeling bolder and less self-conscious about how uninteresting I may have seemed, how lined my face was, how jiggly my thighs had become, and whether Francesco had noticed any of this.
“I see you like il vino, bella,” Francesco said in amusement as I started in on a third glass.
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re drinking just as much.”
He smiled, nodded, and beckoned for the waiter to bring us a second bottle.
Once we were halfway through our entrées—seafood pasta with a light cream sauce for me, and rose
mary T-bone steak with a side of alfredo pasta—we were talking comfortably again. All the edges of my self-doubt were softened now. I even told him about Becky’s wedding and how Grandma had humiliated me in front of the congregation.
“But why is this the situation?” he asked, his face growing more serious after he had finished laughing about my admittedly amusing humiliation.
“Why is what the situation?” I asked.
He seemed to struggle for words. “You. You are still single. Why? You are a pretty woman. I am sure a man would want you.”
I tried not to take his words the wrong way.
“I just haven’t found the right one yet,” I said. Then, seeing an almost wounded expression cross Francesco’s face, I backtracked. “But maybe the right one isn’t in New York.”
We let the words dangle meaningfully between us. I noticed that Francesco didn’t argue, and I knew from the look on his face that he understood exactly what I meant.
“Perhaps,” he said finally. He studied my face for a moment more and then winked at me. “Perhaps he is here in Roma.”
My heart leapt. He was definitely flirting with me. All of the awkwardness I’d felt earlier had been in my own mind, a product of my own subconscious trying to defeat me with a barrage of doubts. I cleared my throat, smiled, and said in my sexiest voice, “Maybe he is.”
We rushed through the rest of our meal and the remainder of the bottle of wine, taking long sips as we stared at each other over the rims of our wineglasses. Francesco kept making cin cin toasts—to us, to the past, to the future, to Rome itself, to the good fortune that had brought me back to him after all these years.
Still, something felt off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. As I downed more wine, I resolved to chalk it up to the inevitable discomfort of being lovers who had become strangers and were slowly finding their way back.
Francesco paid the bill quickly, and after we both downed a shot of ink-black Lavazza espresso, we stumbled out into the street, Francesco’s strong right arm around me, pulling me close. I could feel his weight on me, and I liked it.
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