by Liam Pieper
He shrugged off any thanks and refused to discuss the cost, deflected the question when it came up at a dinner party they held that winter in their new shared brownstone apartment.
‘It costs an arm and a leg,’ he quipped. ‘But she’s family. There’s not much more important than family. Anything else you can buy, but not that.’
Sasha was constantly surprised by little things. The way he looked so helpless in his sleep. The pitch and tenor of his snoring – the soft, high-pitched drone so far removed from the husky boom when he woke, calling out for coffee, for her to come back to bed. Living with him was revelatory in ways mundane and magical: the shaving scum of bristles and foam left in sinks, the loamy funk of a laundry hamper filled with squash whites – the existence of special whites for playing squash.
She slipped right into his life like she had always belonged in it, shared his bed, his car, his friends. She thought of herself as a virus, slipping into the system, taking up the essential information from her new host and quietly thriving.
There was a wedding and, somewhere around there, Sasha surmised that this is how life happens. You go to bed so stressed your heart rattles in its cage and wake up years later with a husband who owns a shiny Montblanc watch, who wants to take you to see Mont Blanc, who talks about the pleasures of the Alps the way boys back home talked about cars they had no hope of ever owning.
And then one day she was in a rental car that cost more than the apartment she’d grown up in, cruising from Basel to Como on roads that wound casually through the most stunning landscape she could imagine, that she’d never even thought to imagine. Tiny ancient villages dotted the edge of lakes where mountains shrugged off glaciers into crystalline, eternal stretches of meltwater. Sasha pressed her nose to the window as the car whipped through the Alps and, when the window failed to fog up, she realised she was holding her breath. Her mother had been right all along, the world was wider and more beautiful than anyone could truly understand.
He was just a man – one who’d never really known hardship, and whose moral compass was accordingly smooth and unpocked, but a man all the same. He asked questions and then waited impatiently for her to stop talking so he could launch into a long explanation or anecdote about himself. Like every man she’d known, he’d happily prattle on about one thing or another that fascinated him – until interrupted by another man.
In Stephan’s case, she was surprised to discover that he really did know what he is talking about. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of wine, music, art, politics, economics, a smattering of Italian that he didn’t use at all in Italy, but would casually burst into in a red-sauce place back in Manhattan.
If she stopped and took the time to think about it, she’d jumped into the marriage without thinking too hard; it seemed like a good path out of an impossible situation, and she wasn’t the first person to marry someone she barely knew. It was only after the wedding that she found time to see him in a new light, felt she was beginning to understand him, to peel away one layer after another. The idea excited her, the limitless potential of these little revelations, the idea that she would spend a lifetime uncovering new depths and textures in her husband, like lazily tearing apart a babka cake.
There was no time for a honeymoon, not for years, not until there was a precious month during which he was able to extricate himself from his work. They would spend that entire month in Europe, and he had spent so many years planning, marked out every day with such romantic precision, that the whole thing proved disastrous.
Something she should have realised about her husband much earlier: he didn’t like surprises. When things didn’t go to plan, it threw him off-kilter. What read as quiet confidence in New York – where he could turn the rhythm of a conversation up and down like a thermostat – abandoned him when he was out of his element. The further he got from uptown the more discombobulated he became. Abroad, he was less adept, he got things wrong, lost his temper, was prone to sulks.
Over one European summer, as his linen shirts soaked through and his skin took on a sweaty, sunburnt patina, some of the shine wore off. His chinos grew snug – one night at a trattoria his button exploded off his trousers and rolled across the marble floor, and they both stared after it in dismay. For the first weeks and months of their relationship, when they’d spent most of their time alone, he’d seemed to take up all the space in the room. Now, out in the wider world, she began to see him with new eyes, from new angles. It was a little jarring – the difference between posing for the mirror and catching your reflection by surprise in the window of a 7-Eleven fridge.
He became tense when things did not go to plan, when he was inconvenienced, when a coveted restaurant was closed, when a taxi-driver ripped him off. At those times he became distant, and everything he said became laconic and lightly iced.
This happened more and more often as they headed south, through Venice, Florence and Rome, to the Amalfi Coast, where centuries of tourism had calcified into a veneer of hustlers, beige food and bad-tempered waiters who had no patience for Americans – especially brash, square-jawed WASPy Americans who spoke loud English everywhere they went.
After a porter they had engaged to carry their baggage up the cliff to their Atrani hotel – four suitcases stacked precariously over his head – dumped them roughly on their floor, he held his hand out for a tip. Her husband was outside on the balcony admiring the view, leaving her alone. She slid a ten-euro note into the porter’s palm, which he looked at in disgust.
‘More,’ he said.
‘I have paid,’ she said, trying to inflect a shrug with her voice.
‘It is ten euro per bag. Four bags. Forty euro.’
Sasha was uncertain – vibrating between two equally awful certainties. Either this man was taking advantage of her because he thought all Americans were stupid or she was on the verge of the kind of ignorant faux pas that travelling Americans were legendary for inflicting on innocents around the world. At that moment, she was equally convinced of both possibilities.
The man cried out and snapped his fingers in her face. Almost by reflex she handed over the money. He took it without a word, blank faced, and slipped out the door and down the cliff.
Once they were alone, Stephan went into the little kitchenette to retrieve a bottle of prosecco left out to welcome them. As he was working it open, she told him about her interaction with the porter.
‘Do you think he ripped me off?’
He stopped, stared at the cork, halfway out. ‘Yes. He did.’
‘Ugh, jerk!’ She threw herself down onto a chaise lounge.
Stephan didn’t move. He stood quite still, stared at her, his fist wrapped around the cork. He held her eyes and said, quite calmly, ‘The world is full of jerks. The trick is not to be stupid enough to give them your money.’ She flushed and he twisted the cork, which ejected into his hand with a muted pop. ‘Or, to be completely accurate, my money.’
He took the bottle and strode past her, out to the little balcony, taking a seat in one of the cheap aluminium chairs set around an ancient terracotta table. He drank straight from the bottle, glaring out at the view. She stood, uncertain, waiting for a sign of what to do, but none came. He stared at the horizon as though expecting it to throw a punch.
After a moment she slipped into the bathroom. As she ran the hot faucet, her own mood turned sour. Who did he think he was, talking to her like that? Had he always been like that? Was this how it would be from now on? She stood in the shower until the hot water began to run out, then she turned the water as cold as it went and stood under the stream until the flesh on her arms dimpled and she was gasping for breath.
When she left the bathroom, Stephan was standing at the door, dressed in khaki shorts and a linen shirt. The bottle of prosecco remained on the balcony table in full sun, half-finished and already flat.
‘Let’s go,’ he said brusquely. ‘I’m hungry.’
He sulked all through dinner, not speaking, and then abruptly brightened as the desser
t arrived. He launched into a story about the last time he’d been in Amalfi, on a summer break from college, without any preamble or acknowledgement of the hour and a half of sullen silence that had preceded it.
That night, Sasha couldn’t sleep. The night was too hot and loud. On a rooftop nearby someone was setting off fireworks, and they arced and fizzled on the water.
Stephan had brought his laptop, and when she woke the next morning he was already deep in work emails. She left their hotel room wearing a swimsuit under her dress. Outside, she was jostled by harried tourists nudging each other to secure a photo. Seeking peace, she wandered down the main street, towards the coast, left behind the gridlocked Fiats and angry men yelling at each other over scratched chassis, past the precarious cliff where a renaissance gun turret had been converted into a not-great seafood restaurant, and down into the Atrani plaza, where the elevated coastal highway ran through the town and the beach was divided into two sections – a neatly tilled private beach, where sun lounges and towels could be hired, and a stretch of scrappy black sand and gravel.
She had brought no money so she laid her towel on the beach, retrieved a novel from her bag, and realised that she stood no chance of either relaxation or survival under this sun. She knew there was a glorious golden-brown tan somewhere in her genes but to retrieve it would require a harrowing journey of repeated sunburns and urgent moisturising. She decided against sun bathing, walked down to the water.
Up close, she found the water off Atrani beach was not the startling azure of the postcards or the view from her hotel, but the oily black of the sand. The sea was still; it could have been spun glass but for the rainbow scum of tanning oil that floated on the surface and pooled around her thighs as she strode through it. Sharp rocks on the seabed bruised her feet so she submerged and swam out in careful breaststrokes, careful not to put her head underwater, her hair tied up in an efficient bun.
She felt something brush against her calf, and when she looked down into the deep – nothing; the water inky and impenetrable. A little spooked, she swam out only a short way and then stopped, floated, caught her breath – which was taken by the sensation of being weightless in this startling black Mediterranean under the pugilistic blue of the sky, between them the jumbled pastel mess of Atrani.
From out here, the tumble of bright villas seemed to make sense and, feeling inspired, Sasha swam back to shore, wanting to head inland and climb up Atrani’s backstreets.
She was soon lost in a maze of steep staircases and cool tunnels carved through rock. Not long into the climb she found herself in a narrow alleyway that ended in a smooth plaster grotto where two or three staircases met, all leading off in different directions. Already directionless, she picked one and hoped for the best.
She’d hoped to discover a path leading back down to the beach, but instead found herself headed upwards, huffing up a precarious, shadeless staircase. Muscles she hadn’t really used since waitressing began a chorus of complaint. In no time she was drenched in sweat, big salty droplets raining from her forehead to the bleached stone steps, where they evaporated almost instantly.
She became aware that she was the only person on these streets out in the midday sun, but she refused to yield. It was a matter of pride now, even if no one would ever know she was up here. Besides, she was enjoying herself. This might have been her favourite part of the honeymoon so far, actually; the solitude, so close to loneliness but a different beast altogether. A pleasure to forget it all for a moment, let the world slip away behind her, no goal but one foot in front of the next. She liked the lightheaded feeling brought on by exhaustion and the sensation that none of this was strictly real, that these staircases would never end, that one would always fold into the next like an Escher maze.
To motivate herself, every few steps she’d turn and snatch a few breaths while admiring the view, which was improving exponentially every time she turned around. She passed doorway after doorway with an old woman standing on the threshold, staring mutely at her as she climbed – wondered what she must look like to them, this crazy tourist on a death march. In her soaked linen dress, she felt acutely her lack of fitness, the heaviness of her body.
The road she was on ended abruptly – she turned a corner and found an ornate iron gate blocking her way. Beyond it, a grove of lemon trees and a path led to an ancient church. The trees were untended, overgrown, lemons scattered on the grass beneath the trees, which looked impossibly lush and comfortable from the dusty alley.
‘Hey!’ she called, banging on the gate. ‘Hey, is anyone there?’ She was sure she saw movement, the flicker of a shape behind one of the stained-glass windows of the church, but there was nothing, no response, no matter how loudly she called for attention. The grove remained deserted and the gate sensibly shut. She rattled it angrily before she let it turn her back.
It was infuriating to climb this whole way for nothing. She hadn’t known this church existed a moment ago, but now it seemed deeply unfair that it was barred to her. Was it that much to ask for a decent reward for spontaneity and whimsy?
She knew she was supposed to find it charming, the crowded buildings in faded colour, the rude waiters, the history that bleached the stones and scrubbed visitors of grumpiness and ill-will, the lemon trees clinging to life on cliff faces, but there was nothing for her in the town but sticky heat and being iced out by her husband. Holidays were awful, she concluded. She should never have left New York. She never should again. She should definitely never have climbed the side of this mountain, which she now saw was being ringed by dark moody clouds, sliding in from the sea.
The storm broke on her way down, and with the change in the air her mood tilted on its axis. Drunk with exhaustion, she careened down the stairs like her body was something she’d stolen.
By the time she reached the hotel she was wet through. She kicked in the door and wrung out her hair. Stephan, cooled down now, assessed the situation and closed his laptop. He was inside her before she had a chance to undress, her dress bunched around her hips as he cupped his hands under her ass and lifted her up against the wall. Their lovemaking violent and high-velocity, they bounced from the wall to the couch to the cheap IKEA bed, until it collapsed and spilled them, laughing and messy, onto the sandy floor of the apartment.
‘We should get up. This floor,’ she said at last, ‘is very dirty.’
They went to a bar in Amalfi and got sloppy drunk, then walked back across the hill to Atrani to have dinner in one of five near-identical restaurants in the town square. The menus were in four languages and the food was mediocre, but they didn’t mind at all. The food was hardly the point.
It was dark by the time they began to walk home. Sasha stole a glance up the hill, wondering where the gate she’d encountered led in the end. As they walked, a projector somewhere on the cliff face switched on and against the mountainside a projection of the Virgin flickered into life, watching over the valley. It was glorious in its tackiness, exactly the sort of exultant and ultimately awful gesture her home diocese might have pursued, had they the means and the inspiration.
She thought that her mother would love it, which crashed into the realisation that she had not thought of her for ages. Her heart ached with the guilt. A clot of something dangerous broke free from its mooring deep in her chest and started to work its way headward.
When they got back to their hotel they were still a little drunk, weaving, ignoring the ruins of the bed and stripping the cushions off the leatherette monstrosity of a couch so Sasha could perch on top, the stitching pressing its pattern into her knees. Stephan’s eyes were closed, his hands clamped loosely against her sides. She could feel her ribs sliding under his fingers, strangely off-putting, and although he was right below her he seemed a million miles away – there was something of the oily, still water of Atrani in his expression, until, about to come, his eyes opened and his hands seized her hips and pulled her closer into him.
Afterwards, she fetched tissues and wriggled b
ack under her husband’s arm, hit him lightly with the back of her hand. ‘You could have given me some warning, buddy. Now I’ve gotta go to a pharmacist and work out the Italian for “I have to kill a baby.”’
He didn’t laugh, propped himself up on an elbow, suddenly serious.
‘What if we didn’t?’
When they got home they started trying properly. They began referring to the guest room of their townhouse as ‘the nursery’ and debated what colour they should paint it.
One day in December, on her way back from a lunch date with a friend – really, one of Stephan’s hand-me-downs – she stopped by the Macy’s windows and, on impulse, walked in. She wandered the aisles picking up this and that, and finally emerged with two huge shopping bags full of children’s toys. When Stephan came home from work that night she was arranging the toys in various formations so intently that she didn’t notice him standing in the doorway, his tie loose and his arms folded. He wandered in, bent to kiss her and sat down next to her, began to paw through the toys, exclaiming at this or that.
‘Holy shit! A GI Joe! I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid. I think I had this same one.’
He reached for another one of the toys, a soft doll with smooth wooden limbs and a cartoonish, friendly face and plaited pigtails. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘That’s Sarah. She was my favourite when I was little!’ Sasha held up another toy, just like it, but this one a boy – with short hair and blue overalls. ‘And this is her brother, Mitty!’ She waggled the dolls in her hands and their floppy limbs and hair flailed about.
Stephan took the toy, turned it over. ‘It says here it’s made in Australia. Who makes anything in Australia? What sort of wood is this? It smells nasty.’
‘I love them! I had one just like it when I was growing up. I think they’re lovely.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Stephan. ‘They are objectively terrible. But if it’s important to you.’ He handed the doll back to Sasha, kissed her on the forehead, walked away.