by Ann Hood
“Yes,” he says. “But what about love? You may be happy here,” he says, tapping her temple, “but what about here?”
His hand goes to her heart, and lingers there, cupping her breast. He moans slightly, and Lucy turns to see if anyone has noticed. But the trattoria is full of people enjoying their food, the sunny Saturday afternoon, each other. No one cares if there is a man sipping espresso and feeling a woman’s breast.
Just as quickly as he placed it there, Antonio lifts his hand and motions to the waiter. He orders two Sambucas, con mosca.
Lucy’s head is already spinning from the wine. But she doesn’t stop him.
When the Sambuca arrives Antonio says, “Con mosca. You know what that means?”
She does but pretends not to.
“With flies,” he says. He plucks a coffee bean from one of the glasses. “You must have three,” he explains. “For luck. For love. And to ensure that you return to Roma.”
She has never heard this before, about the three coffee beans. But she accepts his stories. His stories about saints and Rome are good, like little gifts. She asks him for another one.
He studies her face with his green-gold eyes. He smiles. He says, “Do we have time for a ride? I will take you somewhere for another story.”
Lucy has already decided she will call the hotel and say she is sick. Tonight, her Whirlwind group has an authentic Italian meal in a villa. The hotel concierge will get them on the bus; the restaurant owner will make sure they get back on it safely after dinner. She will go with Antonio. She will listen to his stories. She wants to feel nothing except happy for this one night.
In his bright red Fiat they drive, the top down, Lucy’s hair blowing about, to the Via Sacra and the Temple of Vesta.
Antonio holds her hand as they walk through the elaborate structure.
This was built for the goddess of fire,” he says.
Lucy wonders if all these double meanings are just in her head. Does he know what he is saying? she thinks. She tries to imagine him naked. She pushes Jasper out of her mind.
“The Vestal Virgins lived here,” Antonio is saying. “Their job was to keep the fire burning all the time. In the center.”
He must be saying these things on purpose, she thinks. She finds herself pressing closer to him.
“As long as they remained virgins,” Antonio says, “they were considered the most respected and powerful women in ancient Rome.”
“And if they lost their virginity?” Lucy asks him.
He pauses. His eyes twinkle wickedly. “Then they were buried alive.”
Lucy’s skin erupts with goosebumps. “Here?” she says.
Antonio shrugs. “In those days,” he says, laughing, “maybe it was better to remain a virgin.”
He leans toward her and kisses her. His moustache tickles, she tastes the sweet Sambuca on his lips. She returns the kiss with a burst of passion that she has not felt in months with Jasper. She thinks of fire, she thinks of being buried alive.
Antonio whispers, “Up ahead, on the Via Sacra, is the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine.”
She does not take her lips from his mouth.
He says, “That is the most important existing example of Roman architecture.”
She moves her tongue around in his mouth. His hands have lifted her dress, and move underneath it, upward.
“And there is the Palatine hill,” he says into her neck. “Where Romulus founded Rome.”
She arches toward him, toward his exploring fingers.
“And there is my apartment,” Antonio says. “Where no great historical event has occurred.”
“That,” Lucy says, “sounds the most interesting.”
When Lucy gets off the elevator in her building, she smells turkey cooking. For a while, before Katherine moved in with Meryl, it was almost a relief to come home to her loud music, to the sound of her singing songs from Camelot or Saturday Night Fever at the top of her lungs.
Lucy stops and leans against the wall. Her thighs ache from her night with Antonio. He was a passionate lover; a lover of endurance. She cannot remember the last time she has felt so sexy, so wanted. It is how she used to feel with Jasper, before his jaw grew so rigid. Before he stopped talking to her about his dreams, his dancing, his thoughts.
She smells Madeira wine, wild mushrooms. It’s his newest stuffing recipe. She finds herself wondering if he will be able to tell right away that she has been unfaithful. If there is something changed about her on the outside too. When she was in college, she lost her virginity with a boy named Gary. A senior. A Phi Sigma Kappa with a girlfriend back home. Gary had taken her to his room, where they drank Narragansett beer out of cans and made love all night. She was sure the next morning that everyone on campus could tell just by looking at her what she had done.
Now that same thought creeps into her mind. She closes her eyes and hugs herself hard. Then she starts to cry. That is how Jasper finds her a few minutes later.
“What?” he asks her. “What is it?”
But Lucy can’t look at him. She can’t answer. She just keeps crying.
Jasper puts his arm around her and leads her toward the apartment.
“That’s all right,” he says. “You’re just tired. This Rome trip is crazy. It’s too much for one weekend.”
She nods, accepts his explanation.
“What you need,” he tells her, “is a hot bath. With lots of bubbles.”
She nods again. She thinks, Come va? What’s happening?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
“FIRST,” KATHERINE TELLS LUCY and Julia, “I go around the room and have everyone say their name with a favorite food that starts with the same sound.”
Julia and Lucy look at her blankly.
“For example,” Katherine says, taking a breath, “you could be Julia Jell-O. Lucy Lemonade.”
Julia nods politely and sips at her margarita, but Lucy frowns.
“Well,” Katherine says, “it’s first grade after all.”
They are at her new apartment, the one she shares with Meryl King in. Stuyvesant Town. Katherine has invited them here for dinner. She has copied exactly a menu from Gourmet magazine—frozen margaritas and guacamole to start, vegetarian chili and sangria for the main course, Mexican coffee and fried, sugared tortillas for dessert.
Meryl King, thank God, is away on a buying trip in Los Angeles. Meryl always wants to stay up late and sing old sorority songs. She wants to call college friends late at night and reminisce. Whenever Katherine walks in the door, Meryl greets her with a booming laugh and the old secret handshake. Katherine is embarrassed by this. She cannot believe it is worth it to put up with these things just for the pleasure of sleeping on a lumpy Castro convertible in the middle of the apartment.
The third roommate, the one who gets the small bedroom, a woman named Bianca, is at a support group meeting. Bianca is an enabler. Or so she told Katherine. She attends AA meetings, ACA meetings, meetings for women who love too much. Bianca also told Katherine she used to be bulimic and abuse narcotics. Now, she wakes Katherine early every morning with the sounds of her Jane Fonda workout tape and the whirring of the blender as it mixes her healthy protein breakfast drink.
Katherine has invited Julia and Lucy here for dinner, hoping that whatever it is about her that turns them off so much can somehow be changed. She wants them to be her friends. She wants to be able to talk to someone about things other than addictions and sorority life. Her good spirits are beginning to fade. The last time Andy called, she spent all that night suddenly remembering all the reasons she’d fallen in love with him, instead of the reasons why she’d left. She’s afraid this kind of thinking could land her in Newton, the unhappy wife of a dermatologist.
“It serves two purposes,” Katherine tells them. “I learn their names and see how far they are phonetically.”
The armchair has her autumn classroom decorations stacked on it, construction-paper leaves in fall colors, carefull
y cut-out block letters that say WELCOME. Her weather and date chart is leaning against one wall, her carefully printed alphabet cards against another.
Julia says, “I hated first grade.”
“You did?” Katherine says, surprised. She imagines Julia as always this cool, this with it. Someone other children would want to be friends with.
“I was so fat,” she moans. Quickly she puts down a nacho dripping with guacamole, as if that one single chip could transport her back to a chubby childhood.
Katherine remembers how surprised she was when she saw Julia dressed in tighter clothes. “You’re not now,” she says.
“Once you’re fat,” Julia says, “you stay fat forever.”
Lucy says, “I wasn’t fat, but I hated it too.”
Again Katherine is surprised. “You?”
She shrugs. “I never felt like I belonged there.”
Katherine says, “I loved first grade. Maybe that’s why I became a teacher.” She wants all of her students to have the same memories she has of school. She thinks of it as a warm place, filled with songs and reading. When Katherine walks into her classroom, even now, she feels good. She loves the smell of chalk and new pencils, the shiny wooden floors and worn books.
But Julia and Lucy are still looking so miserable, she says, “Maybe you remember it differently than it really was. Maybe it wasn’t really so bad.”
Now Julia laughs. “Trust me,” she says. “It was awful.”
Lucy says, “What else do you do the first day, Katherine? Give us a positive experience this time around.”
“I read them a story. I have them paint a picture of their family—”
Julia groans. “I always hated that. My family was miserable. A typical broken home, you know? Once the teacher even called my mother in. She was all worried because I drew myself as a princess and my mother as a little tiny person. I always drew my mother like an ant.”
Katherine sighs. “That’s significant,” she says.
Then she cannot think of anything else to say. She feels exhausted. Tomorrow is her first day at school and her usual techniques seem all wrong now. Maybe New York schools are different. Maybe she will have a classroom full of kids like Julia, dressed in clothes that are funkier than hers, their hair dyed platinum blond, tiny bunches of plastic fruit hanging from their ears. Maybe none of them will like her either.
“My students always like me,” she says, surprising herself that she says it out loud. “I mean,” she adds, “I’m a good teacher.”
Lucy says, “You’re the perfect first-grade teacher.”
And Julia agrees.
Katherine sighs again. She isn’t sure if Lucy has complimented her or insulted her. She finds herself wanting to prove that she really is a good teacher. If only she’d brought all the clumsy cards and cheap perfume her students have given her in the past. But all those things were back in Connecticut with the other remnants of her old life.
“What else will you do tomorrow?” Lucy is asking her.
Katherine relaxes a little. Lucy’s eyes seem kinder than they have in a long while. “I ask them what they want to be when they grow up.”
“There’s a sign of the times,” Julia says. “Six years old and they need to claim their career goals.”
“No,” Katherine says, her voice defensive now. “I learn a lot about them that way.”
“I thought every little girl wanted to be a princess,” Julia says.
“Or a mommy,” Lucy says, groaning.
Katherine realizes that they are not really attacking her, or her teaching plan. Like her, they are just trying to figure out their own lives. “Or Vicky Valentine,” Katherine says.
Lucy laughs. “Definitely.”
Julia looks at them both and for an instant Katherine thinks she is frightened. But then she asks calmly, “Who’s Vicky Valentine?”
Katherine and Lucy both talk at once.
“She’s a teenager by day, a detective by night.”
“An urban Nancy Drew.”
“She lives in Manhattan—”
“On Park Avenue—”
“With her perfect parents. The rich lawyer father, the sophisticated but loving mother. The cute freckle-faced brother.”
“But at night she and her two friends solve mysteries and save lives.”
Julia begins to eat some guacamole and chips. She nods as they talk.
“How could you have lived all these years and never read a Vicky Valentine mystery?” Katherine asks her.
“There are thousands of them,” Lucy says, still smiling at the memory of those books. “Much better than Nancy Drew.”
“I don’t know,” Julia says. “I missed them somehow.”
Katherine says, “I used to play Vicky Valentine with my sister all the time. We’d take our flashlights and look for clues in the garage.”
Lucy is nodding. “Vicky Valentine had the best life you can imagine,” she says.
It is a warm night and it seems to Julia and Lucy as they walk home from Katherine’s that the streets are rilled with people in love. Everyone is holding hands, kissing on street corners, clinging to each other.
“This is so depressing,” Julia says.
Lucy suggests they walk downtown to the Blue Painted Door, where Jasper will give them free drinks. When they were crazy in love with each other, she used to meet him at closing time at the bars where he worked and they would drink free cognac while he closed up. She hasn’t done that in a long time.
“Katherine’s not so bad,” Julia is saying. “She tries so hard.”
“Too hard,” Lucy mumbles.
“Why doesn’t she go home?” Julia asks her.
Lucy shrugs. She too has been thinking those things, that Katherine isn’t as bad as she makes her out to be. That she should go back home. “Who knows?”
The Blue Painted Door is not very crowded, and they find seats at the bar right away. Jasper grins when he sees them, but when he takes their drink orders the grin has already faded. He complains about how few tips he’s made, how rude the customers are, how tired he is.
When he walks away, Julia whispers, “Remember when he used to smile?”
Lucy nods. She watches him, frowning toward a man at the bar. She tries to give him a break. The customers are all dressed in black clothes, a room full of trendy vampirelike people. The women have on miniskirts and Lycra, the men boxy Japanese suits. There is an unpleasant atmosphere here, she tells herself.
Then Julia whispers, “Remember when he was a dancer?”
Lucy keeps her eye on Jasper. She wonders how different things would be if he were still trying to dance. She is afraid she is going to cry. She leans closer to Julia. “I feel really terrible about something,” she whispers.
“About Jasper?” Julia asks her.
“No,” Lucy says. “Well, sort of. I had an affair.” She laughs at the word. “A fling is more appropriate.”
Julia’s eyes widen. “When?”
“In Rome,” Lucy says. She is carefully shredding a bright blue napkin.
Jasper winks at her from the end of the bar.
“God,” Lucy moans, unable to even smile at him in return.
“With an Italian guy?” Julia is saying.
Lucy nods. “The worst part,” she says, “is I enjoyed it. It felt good being with someone other than Jasper.”
“Someone who wasn’t so gloomy,” Julia reminds her.
“I feel awful,” Lucy says. She cannot look at Julia. Her fling with Antonio seems worse now that she’s said it out loud.
Julia tries to cheer her up. “Did he want to know all about America?” she asks.
“No. He told me everything you want to know about Rome but were afraid to ask.”
Julia frowns. “No kidding.”
Jasper brings them their drinks. “You look pretty,” he says to Lucy.
She keeps shredding her napkin. “Thanks,” she says softly.
When he walks away again, Julia says,
“Maybe we should leave.”
Lucy nods but doesn’t get up.
“Let’s walk somewhere else. Shoot everyone out there in love.”
“Okay,” Lucy says.
“Let’s walk over the Brooklyn Bridge,” Julia says.
“What’s in Brooklyn?” Lucy asks her.
Julia hesitates. “My mother.”
Lucy is taken aback. She has known Julia for almost three years and she thought, all this time, that she was from Houston. That her mother lived in Milan. She sees that there is something important in Julia telling her this. Her friend’s face seems expectant somehow. But Lucy says, “I can’t believe you never told me that.”
Julia’s eyes are searching Lucy’s face, but Lucy can’t tell what it is she’s hoping to find there.
“What does she do in Brooklyn?” Lucy says.
“She’s a writer,” Julia tells her.
“Your mother is a writer living in Brooklyn?” Lucy repeats.
Julia laughs a short sad laugh. “Yes.”
“What does she write? For a magazine or something?”
Julia takes a breath. “She writes Vicky Valentine,” she says. Her eyes still travel over Lucy’s face.
Lucy laughs then. “Come on,” she says. “You just told me you never even heard of Vicky Valentine.”
Julia’s voice is calm. She looks Lucy right in the eye. “I know,” she says. “I lied.”
Lucy doesn’t talk much as they walk uptown from the Blue Painted Door. Julia’s heart is pounding. She knows Lucy is angry at her, but she feels elated. She is glad to have told her friend something true about herself, something she usually keeps hidden. Sitting at that bar, feeling Lucy’s sadness, her desperation, Julia had wanted to give her something of herself. When Lucy told her she’d slept with a stranger in Italy, Julia knew she would admit something too.
They reach Lucy’s apartment first.
“Listen,” Julia says, “I’m sorry.”
But Lucy just shakes her head. She looks hurt.
“It’s something I don’t tell people,” Julia starts to explain. “I hated growing up with the shadow of Vicky Valentine, Girl Wonder, around me. It made me feel bad.”
Lucy stops her. “Never mind,” she says.