Everything in the room transformed, inside out and backwards. It seemed like by some cinematic trick, I saw her lips again forming the syllables: San. Dro. Cer. Vi. They fell like sleet from the sky and slapped me in the face. No, my face went numb. No, my heart came to a sudden stop, colliding one final time in slow motion against my chest and then sticking there. A dull pain began to wind up slowly inside of me. My ears filled up with pressurized blood and I went deaf.
Deafened by the sound of Sandro Cervi's name, I watched the headwaiter rise from his podium, and with his rising, the features of his face transformed. The look of disdain he had been hiding only minimally until then was hastily covered up by a warm and flattering smile. His eyes lit up and his mouth formed the same syllables that Summer had pronounced:
Sandro.
Cervi.
At the same time, my mind was attempting to console me. It could be a different Sandro Cervi, my mind whispered. My body wasn't listening. It was flashing hot and cold in patches, and I felt my chest constricting.
Summer was turning to me and beaming. Oblivious. The headwaiter was practically bowing as he opened the curtain and led us through the bustling restaurant, and outside to a garden. Strings of lights kept the courtyard bathed in a warm glow, but I was freezing inside.
It could be someone else, my mind kept urging me. I had to think hard to move my limbs forward, following Summer's swishing hair, her soft skin, her occasional delighted smile directed back to me. Sandro was a common name. Cervi was...probably common. This was Italy. Everyone was a chef.
It could be anyone.
It seemed like we were crossing the garden forever.
And then, Summer parted to one side, to take a seat and greet her instructor. A blond man, his face far more weathered and yet somehow more handsome than last I saw him, moved his piercing blue eyes upward.
Had he known he would see me? There was a moment – and everything seemed to hang in the air for an eternity for that moment – that I could swear his face seemed to register only what he had expected to see. A flicker of a smirk, maybe.
But he very quickly jumped, as though a snake had popped out at him in a garden. Then his geologically creased and handsome face broke into a wide smile, a cartoonish expression of surprise. He extended his arms and widened his mouth even more, looking from the perplexed Summer to the headwaiter to me, to anyone, generally, in the audience of the restaurant that was now watching his theatrics. “Benny?!” he finally shouted. “Benny, Benny Brooks!”
Ah yes. It was that Sandro Cervi.
CHAPTER 6: Sandro Cervi
Before he was Sandro Cervi, popular and sought-after chef with three Michelin stars and more money than God, he was Sandro Cervi, my roommate. Even then, Sandro's face had been creased by his perpetual intensity: he stayed up late, he partied hard, he had a deep passion for anything that interested him and he pursued it relentlessly.
His career.
Women.
Women and more women, but specifically, other mens' women.
My women.
Specifically, one girlfriend.
I was an art history student at the American University in Rome, and while I was having grand time racking up student loan debt and not thinking about it at all, I needed a roommate. Sandro had been introduced to me by a friend.
At the time, Sandro was a cook in a tourist-trap restaurant. We were eating there in the hopes we could get some free bread and a free beer. We were lamenting our financial woes on the sunny patio when I mentioned my need for a roommate.
“I have just the guy,” Ric said.
At that moment, Sandro had been walking out of the kitchen. He was clothed in the long white apron of a kitchen cook, but in spite of what sounded like a chaotic kitchen where marinara sauce salted to American tastes was flying through the air, he was unscathed. He was a neat and tidy guy, which I instantly liked about him.
Sandro was a northern Italian; his hair was blond and his eyes were blue. There was no mistaking him for a Swiss or a German, though: there is a certain swagger, and a certain masculinity that radiate from Italian men. Sandro had it droves.
From beneath his long apron, he produced a basket of bread.
“On the house,” he said, in a crisp English accent. He had attended a boarding school in Switzerland, I would find out later, and his English was flawless. When women came around, he layered it with a creamy frosting of Italian for effect.
It worked.
“This is the guy,” Ric said.
Sandro shot out a hand and smiled his thousand-watts of clean white teeth in my direction.
The thing about Sandro is that even after all of the things that happened between us, when I remember meeting him, or remember him at all – I still have an inclination to like him, in a weird way. As I think of his hand and his smile and the casual way he tucked breadsticks into his pants for laughs, I still like him.
I shook his hand, and his handshake was firm and commanding, but friendly. He had that ease with himself and other guys (and later, I would learn, with women) that made his life a series of uncomplicated interactions with everyone.
“Sandro,” he said to me. To Ric: “Why am I the guy?”
“Ben here needs a roommate,” Ric said.
Sandro nodded, as if the deal had already been done. And in a way, it already had. Like all men and all women who met Sandro, I was under his spell. He simply said what was going to happen, and then it was done. “I'm hardly ever there, mate,” he said, his haughty British accent sliding away easily to some of-the-people variety. He jerked a thumb back toward the kitchen to explain himself.
“Where are you?” he asked me.
I explained where the cramped apartment was, in a trendy and overpriced area that was a few metro stops from here.
Sandro squinted. “Sounds good. When do I move in?”
Sandro had been true to his word: he was hardly ever home. He was neat and tidy, as his apron had suggested.
But when he was home, and our worlds collided, he was a hurricane.
There was no escaping him. Every night that Sandro was home, he dragged me out with him.
The ladies fell at his feet. There was no woman, as far as I had ever seen, who could resist his charm, his alpha-male easiness. He was like a wolf. Lopping nimbly through the packs of women that thronged at the clubs, standing aloof by the bar. Doing nothing, really – but the energy of the entire club would somehow change, as if elevated to a higher pitch, one synchronized with Sandro himself.
Within half an hour he would have five women circling round him. Not just any women – the prettiest, the hottest, the most beautiful women.
“Yeah,” Ric murmured one night, as we watched the whole thing happen in front of us and hoped for a jilted girl to latch on to one of us as a substitute. “I shoulda told you, lock up the girlfriend.”
It wasn't until many months later that it was even an issue.
Sabrina was an American girl, cool and raven-haired. She was studying art history for a year and then she was going back to America to live in a rat-infested loft where she was going to make the next Piss Christ if everything went her way. She was not at all Sandro's type, and Sandro was everything she insulted for hours over rum and diet cokes that she enjoyed ordering to the chagrin of every waiter in Italy. It never even crossed my mind to “lock her up.”
And then they collided.
“Ciao.”
“I'm obviously not Italian.”
Sabrina was cross-legged on my couch, and to my delight, having none of Sandro's alpha-wolf charm. She was playing video games and smoking a cigarette, and she was looking as un-Italian as any woman possibly could. Italian women had nice clothes, for one thing, and then there was the matter of her simply not looking Italian. Her eyes and her features, all lovely, had the softened, blended, American look to them.
There was also the bitchiness. There was European bitchiness, and there was American bitchiness. European bitchiness was of the
I'm-so-bored-while-I-give-you-this-hand-job variety, while American bitchiness was the kind that would get fingers pointed in your eyes and lectures about post-modernist feminism.
Sandro shrugged, and disappeared into his room.
I could not have been more pleased with the interaction, because by then I was hopelessly in love with Sabrina, and her dark-haired beauty, her softness when she was alone with me, her brilliantly scary mind. I liked that she wore torn jeans in her classes, and spoke perfect Italian even though she almost never used it, and was top of her class even though she always seemed to be too tough to even go to class. She was sexy, she was fun, she was smart – and most lovely of all, she seemed completely unaffected by Sandro.
“Aggggh!” she screamed, throwing the controller across the room and covering her eyes. “I'm going to fucking crash!”
We were playing some mindless game that came with the game center a departing student had dumped in his hallway before he left. It was ten years old and pointless, and involved driving trucks into other trucks. Sabrina, endearingly, was trying to drive carefully through the game without hitting any other vehicles.
But I underestimated Sandro, and I underestimated the power of his charm. He reappeared, a moment later, in a t-shirt and jeans, which his physique turned into a magazine ad. He plopped on the couch.
“America,” he declared, and for a moment he sounded like he was going narrate a documentary. “My friend is having a party. It's a big, fun party. Let's all go.”
Sabrina uncovered her eyes and opened her mouth to explain why we couldn't go.
Sandro was looking at her. He had a talent, this guy, that I would never be able to analyze. He had, after all, just met Sabrina, a girl I had never mentioned or described. Somehow, he had composed his face into the perfect blend of humor and sensitivity, mystery and allure, domination and charm...whatever it was, whatever elements Sabrina wanted, and the exact quantities of those elements. He smiled.
“You don't like me, America,” he declared, but my stomach was already seizing up because I could that she did. “But we should not miss an excellent party just because of that. Ben....” he looked at Sabrina and paused. He was drawing her name out of her like a snake charmer.
“Sabrina.”
“Ben, Sabrina. Put on your dancing shoes, or whatever terrible thing you non-Italian people do, and let's boogie.”
Sabrina turned her head to me. She didn't implore. I didn't fight.
There were people who said things, and then the people around them just did them. Sandro was one of those people.
Sandro didn't steal Sabrina from me that night. I would never know, really, how he did it. I could see him circling in, ever-closer. He seasoned his jokes just for her. He helped her translate something with a cranky bartender. He gave her a ride on his Vespa when he saw her walking down the street to the Metro. He pulled us both into his circle with magic fingers, like he was casting a spell. Oh, come to my restaurant. Free dinner for both of you, I'll make it something special.
It was obvious, when I looked back on it. Obvious as anything.
Sabrina loved me, of course. She told me so and we made plans to continue our relationship when she went back to New York. But something else was in her eyes while we made love, and it was Sandro. Sandro who had that dominating thing, Sandro who was so good-looking and so ambitious, Sandro who hammed up his Italian accent to charm the ladies.
I should have done something about it, but I didn't. Who can say what it was? Sandro made the men around him as powerless as the women he charmed. I saw the way that Sabrina's eyes disappeared inside of her own head when Sandro would appear in the apartment, toss his keys on the table, and disappear into his room after a brief, “Ciao, bellisimi.” I saw how she took his every word and gesture and tucked it away in her own mind, where she was fantasizing about him. Her eyes would gloss over, and she would no longer be paying attention.
“Mmmmhmmm,” she would murmur.
“I think I failed that test.”
“Mmmmhmmm.”
“I ate an entire spit roasted pig for lunch.”
“Mmmmhmmm.”
I knew she was dreaming of him. Thinking about him when I was trying to keep her happy in bed. I knew she listened through the walls for Sandro's voice, thinking of his superior body, his superior masculinity. He had her wrapped around his finger long before anything really happened.
When I found them, then, it was no surprise. The only surprising thing was what Sandro had convinced Sabrina to do.
CHAPTER 7: Gone
Twenty years later, in Rome, Sandro embraced me. My chest was getting tighter by the second. I tried to take a deep breath, and made an absurd noise instead. I tried to cover it up by pounding on my chest in the universal sign of heartburn.
Sandro slapped me on the back.
“Don't have a fucking heart attack, man!” Quickly, he turned to Summer, and held up a hand. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Ladies are present.”
Summer was looking from Sandro to me. The confusion on her face seemed genuine. She seemed genuinely surprised.
Or did she?
Sandro hugged me again. Through his silk shirt, I could feel how trim and hard his body was. He was as intense as every, and the energy coiled inside of him and snaked under his skin.
“You two know each other?” Summer said. She was sinking slowly into her seat, and a variety of emotions seemed to be playing across her face.
Meanwhile, my own stomach threatened to turn itself inside out. I looked at Sandro's face, seeking any sign of connivance, any indication that he had something up his sleeve. But it was impossible to tell with him. He was shining his dentist-ad smile on anyone and everything in the room. He yelled, “My old buddy Benny!” to anyone who was listening, which turned out to be quite a few of the people on the patio.
He threw himself backward into his chair, a low-reclining wicker chair straight from Fellini's Italy. “Benny Brooks,” he said again. He shook his head.
I had no idea if his surprise was an act or not.
Sweat had begun to form everywhere that sweat could form, and I felt icy cold in spite of the heat. My fingers felt numb, and my head was actually spinning, on a separate axis, inside of my head. I was sure I was going to stroke out, or puke, or both.
My own voice surprised me with its calm:
“This is such an unbelievable surprise,” I said. “I just...I've had to use the head since we got here. Excuse me.”
I barely felt my feet moving beneath me as I turned, stepped neatly off the raised deck, and made my way past a lightly roaring fountain, the stern-faced headwaiter, a swinging door, a flight of steps. Opened door, closed door, tiny, cramped room.
I leaned my head against the door.
Sweat was pouring from my armpits and my scalp.
Was I going to hyperventilate?
I had to get control of myself.
I had to get control of myself, and then I had to find a way to get Summer alone. I needed to put the breaks on everything we had set in motion. I needed to -
What was I going to tell her? It had to be quick, it had to be to the point.
I want you to fuck other men. Any other man. Just not Sandro.
And Sandro. What about him?
My stomach started to turn again, this time at my own weakness. I knew that what I should do, if I were a real man, would be to go upstairs, take my wife by the hand, and walk out.
No: I would find out from him if he had planned this all along. Surely he knew her last name was Brooks. Surely she had said my name in his presence. Surely he had put it all together, and he knew it was me.
If I were a real man, I would punch him in the face.
If I were a real man, I would have been in control of this whole thing from the start, and I would not have been masterminded by the cool, dominating Sandro.
The fucker.
Heat began to sear through me, rising up to my face. I turned to the washbasin and turned on the
cold water. Leaning on the counter, I looked into the mirror. My eyes were wild and my face was red with anger.
I had to get control of myself.
This asshole had probably plotted the whole thing. And now I had done myself in, I had convinced my own wife to fuck him...
The voice of reason elbowed its way into the dialogue in my head.
Maybe he never knew, at all. Maybe this whole time your wife has just been feeding you lines about screwing around with him. Maybe your name never came up at all...
Was that worse? I asked myself. Was it worse, or better that way, if Summer had never mentioned that she was married, if Sandro had never known her last name.
Don't be an idiot, my angry voice screamed. He's a woman-stealing low-life, and he knows exactly what he's doing.
Shame and anger burned inside of me, each one feeding the other.
I gave myself over to a quick fantasy, in which I marched upstairs, punched him in the mouth, grabbed the wrist of a confused Summer, escaped out the back, and we made love in a taxi.
The room was spinning still, so I clutched the washbasin. I tried counting myself down. I needed to act, to do something to stop this disaster from happening.
Any man but Sandro.
I looked at my watch. How long had I been in here?
I wiped sweat from my brow.
I couldn't leave my wife alone with Sandro Cervi for more than a few moments.
I needed to get my game on.
Summer's laugh, breaking apart like a flock of doves in the air, reached me over all the sounds in the garden dining area. Her head was tipped to one side, and her mouth was open in a wide and generous smile. Candles dotted the table now, magically air-dropped in by the busy waiters. The lights reflected in the wine glasses and her absorbent eyes.
Sandro was making her laugh, of course, and another peal of laughter reached my ears before I made it to the patio.
The Hotwife Summer Page 5