The Summer We Fell Apart

by Robin Antalek

  Before the call connected, she pressed the cancel-call button and scrolled through the numbers saved until she found Eli’s. Without giving herself too much time to think, she hit SEND and then immediately stood and paced the length of her office. When he picked up, she said without indulging in small talk, “Can we meet?”

  Kate’s agnosticism had fueled her curiosity and later anger at the Roman Catholic Church. Especially when she discovered through the course of her translation research that the Vatican had not only priceless paintings but also manuscripts going back centuries locked in the vaults behind heavily fortressed walls in Rome. Included among those manuscripts was the work of an obscure poetess of the sixteenth century, the subject of Kate’s senior thesis: Magdalena Mastopietro, who bore the stillborn child of her father and was subsequently imprisoned for having a child out of wedlock. She committed suicide three days shy of her seventeenth birthday, a day before she was scheduled for execution by the Church. The double sins of sex and suicide ensured that her soul would burn in hell for all eternity.

  Kate’s obsession with Magdalena’s manuscript was what led her to travel to Italy after graduation, where she and Eli were able to get jobs through a program for university grads to teach English in foreign-speaking countries. The pay was nearly nothing, but with both of them working it was enough for a tiny apartment on a crooked, narrow street crammed with shops. Their apartment was above a busy cheese shop that thrummed with noise from dawn till dusk. It was hot in summer and cold in winter, had a bathtub big enough for not quite one person, and no shower. But it didn’t matter. They were together, with an ocean between them and anyone who knew them.

  They slept on a lumpy, down-filled mattress that came with the apartment, which faced the back of the building where two blue-shuttered windows opened onto a minuscule courtyard. Into their windows wafted the slightly tangy, sour smell of soon-to-be-spoiled milk, while just below, hidden away, was a tiny garden where a tangle of ancient grapevines and their landlady’s five prolific chickens lived. Their eggs—the color was a luminous mossy taupe—were fringe benefits of being a tenant and generously provided them with frittatas several times a week.

  Eli, a nonpracticing Jew his entire life, was amused by Kate’s ire toward organized religion, especially what she saw as the oppression of the Roman Catholic Church and the pope, who she felt was just as bad as Hitler for stealing and hoarding art in the name of God. She claimed religion preyed upon the poor and the weak, who had so little to believe in. Sometimes she got so upset during these tirades against the Church that Eli would cover her mouth with his to get her to quiet down. He liked to tease that she worshipped at the church of Eli, especially when she moaned oh my God into his ear as they made love.

  They signed up for a tour of the Vatican when they first arrived in Rome and, as students, were able to access what was touted as one of the secret vaults: a manuscript room. But Kate was disappointed to discover that Magdalena’s was not among the manuscripts available to the public. Her repeated questioning about other supposed secret rooms only served to arouse the suspicions of their tour guide and have them watched carefully for the rest of the tour. That evening, when they got back to their apartment, Kate had taken the crucifix their landlady had hung above their bed off its nail and placed it in a drawer as Eli hummed the theme from The Exorcist.

  Kate’s father came to Florence for the first time several months into their two-year teaching commitment. Kate had been nervous and shy—anxious for things to go well, since this would be only the second time he had met Eli. But as it turned out, her father stayed only one night of his proposed weeklong visit, and most of that time they spent alone. Although he had been distracted by what he kept referring to as a prior commitment in Naples, and Kate had sent him on his way with a bottle of homemade wine from their landlady’s vines along with a wedge of cheese, she was uneasy.

  He had been disappointed that she had not succeeded in viewing Magdalena’s manuscript and had, in fact, abandoned her idea for a book altogether. While he never said a negative word about Eli, he regarded her domestic life with slight derision. To make it worse, he and Eli had barely exchanged ten words and those were on the morning he left. Eli had been stalled in Rome with a school group, due to a train malfunction. By the time he’d gotten home, it was nearly dawn.

  Perhaps that initial disaster had prepared Kate for her father’s second visit. He was traveling with her brother Finn on some sort of backpacking trip. They’d already been to England, Ireland, and France, and were making their way to Italy, to Kate.

  Kate convinced herself that first visit had been bad because she and Eli had still been getting used to each other and to Florence, and a visitor—especially her father—would be less forgiving of those circumstances. The second time was sure to be better. Living with Eli those past two years was more empowering and passionate than she ever imagined.

  With Eli, Kate felt like someone else, in the very best of ways. And that was perfectly fine with her, since all her childhood memories were those of an intense adolescent and angry teen that felt burdened by responsibility—by keeping it all together. Now she reveled in the smallest of things: a bowl of figs, a bath drawn, a dish of marscapone drizzled with honey. She never understood before now how people found their fit with each other, but she and Eli had. She marveled at how easily they fell into their daily life, how they split the domestic duties—she cooked while Eli cleaned—and for once she held no resentment over these tasks. She didn’t feel the weight of house and home like she had when she was growing up and caring for her siblings. Then she had likened them to baby birds abandoned in a nest—mouths constantly open and squawking, looking for sustenance. This was different. She was forging a life—her life.

  In a short amount of time, she had let go of so much, including the poetess Magdalena, who these days rarely entered her thoughts. She had no desire to spend the next few years researching and writing a book. That idea felt like someone else’s right now, even though it had been her own. What did interest her was how few rights women still had centuries later, how the origin of law, really gender-based, created a misogynistic society despite the advances of feminism. Especially in Italy, where myth seemed to be reality: men did want their women to be both Madonna and whore. The women she had gotten to know, their landlady among them (she had taught Kate how to make homemade limoncello), were a wonderfully subversive bunch. They had elevated their subterfuge to a new level that made the men they lived with believe they were in control. Of course the dramas Kate witnessed were mostly familial, in which the real power was in the kitchen with an ancient Nona ruling her large family from behind the stove.

  Everywhere in Florence there were informal conversational language exchanges. Signs were posted all over the square—people offering to speak Italian with you and in turn they practiced their English. Their circle of friends was made up of people they met just this way. Eli had participated in more of the exchanges than Kate, as she was at best, socially anyway, a watcher and Eli was a doer. He jumped right into a social life. He made friends easily and was comfortable whiling away the hours after work in a café, animatedly chatting and smoking, sharing a bottle of wine.

  When Kate had complained that he was spending so much time away from home, their landlady had opened up her small yard behind the cheese shop to Eli and his exchanges. Long-widowed, she seemed to enjoy the men sprawled out beneath the grapevines, laughing and arguing, chewing on waxy, yellow cheese rinds while they drank. Their voices would drift up into their bedroom windows and Kate would lean over the sill for a look—the hot sun bearing down on her head and the tops of her shoulders. Sometimes Eli would glance up and wave, but more often than not he would be too involved in some long philosophy discussion, and eventually Kate would close the shutters and retreat to the front of the apartment.

  Other than that (and really, could she deny Eli a social life outside of her?), their life together was as close to perfect as Kate could ever ima
gine. Sometimes she felt giddy, like the besotted teen she had never been, doodling her boyfriend’s name in her notebook—dreaming of a long white dress and a walk down the aisle. She had settled into a comfortable life and she couldn’t imagine anything disturbing that happiness. She hadn’t been back in the States in two years and had only minimal phone contact with her mother and siblings. Their future was a given—Eli wanted to get married as soon as possible and he saw no reason to wait. He was pushing for her to tell her father when he arrived. Kate was confident that her father would see how she had flourished.

  So when her father showed up without Finn or an explanation, she was relaxed and off her guard. She had gained weight from the wine and pasta and cheese, which had added softness not only to her face and hips but to her demeanor as well, and it made a difference in how she moved through the world. She didn’t bother to pester her father with questions and particulars. Her family had always lacked in execution and follow-through anyway. Besides, in truth, she preferred that her father was here alone—she was proud to show her father the woman she had become, and in the presence of her brother she wasn’t sure if she would have the same confidence, or if her life would appear so bright and shiny.

  Her father was at his most charming—his mood ebullient and generous. He arrived on a break, so both she and Eli had several days to entertain him before they had to go back to work. It would give Eli and her father time to get to know each other. On the first night, her father gifted Kate with a slim gold bangle bracelet to make up for the birthdays he’d missed in the last few years. Kate saw the slight stiffness in his jaw as he made his presentation and pointedly glanced at Eli—but she tossed it off as nerves. Hers or his she wasn’t sure and then she convinced herself they were hers most likely. He joined Eli and his foreign language group friends for a long afternoon of wine. He praised every meal Kate cooked, no matter they were humble affairs of eggs, cheese, bread, and tomatoes, and when finally, on Sunday evening, after several hours in their favorite restaurant, Eli told her father they intended on marrying, soon, her father had reached across the table and, turning her wrist over, had stroked the inside of her arm by running the bracelet up and down while he openly struggled and searched for something to say.

  After an awkward moment, Kate had pulled her arm away and put her hand in Eli’s lap. Eli took her cold fingers and squeezed them while her father recovered from the shock of his twenty-four-year-old daughter’s intentions, smiled broadly, and filled their glasses to the brim in order to toast their happiness. Eli had squeezed her fingers again, as if to say there was nothing to worry about, and they lifted their glasses.

  On the surface, it appeared that Eli should not have worried, for her father’s campaign was ever so subtle. He started with the most innocuous of questions about their life, their plans for the future. Would they live in Italy for a few more years? Sign another contract to teach? Shouldn’t they go back to the States and see if they could handle life there instead of living in this fairy tale?

  All together, these questions would have been tantamount to attack. Taken one at a time, over a meal or on a meandering walk through town in search of the perfect espresso, they were just parental nudges about the future. Never mind that her father hadn’t been a parent in the most basic of capacity. He was interested now and Kate found herself drawn in and aching to please under his very intense, singular attention. Even though she was the oldest of four—and therefore the only one of her siblings to have ever been alone with their parents as a child—she couldn’t remember a time when her father’s focus was solely on her, and it was, she was embarrassed to admit, intoxicating.

  Soon it was her father and not she who pointed out that Eli seemed to be taking longer and longer to come home after work. And when he did arrive home, he always smelled of wine and smoke and on one occasion had actually stumbled into the dining table long cleared from a supper he did not join them to eat. In bed, he turned his back on her, sullen, like a little boy unused to sharing his favorite toy. Their sex life had suffered as well and had reached an all-time low the afternoon her father’s trip to Calabria had been canceled and he surprised them by coming back into the apartment, causing them to jump out of bed and hop around the room scrambling for clothes. Later on, Eli would tell her that he was sure her father planned that—he was trying to drive them apart—but Kate had refused to believe her father was capable of any evil machination.

  The night her father had surprised them, Eli was unusually persistent in his quest for her body. His hands were everywhere, as though he had something to prove, until she relented in the dark, beneath the blankets, while her father slept on the cot on the other side of the wall. It was the least satisfying, impersonal sex they had ever had, and neither of them could bear to look at the other in the morning.

  Kate begged Eli to be a little more understanding—this was her father and he wouldn’t be here forever. When he was gone, she thought, they would go back to the way things were before. Eli responded by staying away. He explained that he was trying to salvage what they had, and while he knew he was being unreasonable, he didn’t trust himself to not make the situation worse. Kate was scared and eventually confided in her father, naively believing that he would offer her some guidance on the male psyche—she didn’t want to drive Eli further away.

  On his last evening in Florence, she and her father went to dinner alone. Before he said anything, he placed his hands on either side of her head. He touched her hair and gathered it loosely in his fingers until he formed pigtails. He smiled and tugged on them, as if to say, Remember? Kate had squirmed in her seat. Finally, he told her she was too young to marry. That neither she nor Eli were to blame; they just needed to grow and experience life without each other. He hinted that Eli was directionless and too weak for someone like her. While he might make her happy now, he would never be capable of keeping her happy. When Kate confronted him and asked if he had shared his opinion with Eli, he played coy, but she knew that he must have suggested as much.

  Instead, in an abrupt change of subject, he claimed that it pained him to see Kate settling into becoming a housewife when she had a brilliant mind—a mind that could make a difference and change the world. After he tried flattery, he urged her to go back to school—to consider law, politics even. He knew she had taken the LSAT test before she had graduated from college because, before Eli, a secondary degree had always been her plan. He said he couldn’t force her to do anything—she was an adult—but if she married Eli now, he would be tremendously disappointed.

  Her father left at dawn the next day. He’d been with them a little over ten days. She heard him shuffling around in the other room as he gathered his things. She waited until she heard his footsteps retreat and the courtyard door latch strike against the post as he swung it shut behind him before she went in search of Eli. She found him asleep, curled on his side, snoring under the arbor in the backyard.

  Alone for the first time in weeks, they didn’t make love; they didn’t even really talk. They just lay next to each other, shoulder to shoulder, with their fingers loosely twined as the sun came up. Kate had pictured how they must look from above the bed: like corpses side by side. Her father’s presence had colored everything. When she examined her life with Eli, where there had once been nothing but light, there was now a web of tiny dark fissures.

  To start over, Kate and Eli went on holiday to Greece. He surprised her with a ring one morning when she was waking from a dream, sliding it onto the ring finger of her left hand. Drowsy, through half-open lids, Kate had allowed him to remove the bracelet her father had given her and place it on the table next to the bed. It wasn’t until a week later, when they returned to Florence, that she remembered she had left it there. By then it was too late to call and ask the hotel if someone had found it and turned it in. She imagined it on the wrist of a deeply tanned, thin-armed girl with long, dark hair. Occasionally, she would make a circle around her wrist with her thumb and forefinger where the br
acelet once was. She would feel sad for a moment, and then her eyes would catch the carved silver band that Eli had placed on her finger.

  Soon after their trip, when the equilibrium had been delicately restored and plans for their future seemed more real than ever, Kate received a package from her father. Inside, there was no note, just a thick sheaf of applications from a collection of the best law schools in the United States. Kate took the envelope and shoved it into an empty suitcase on top of the wardrobe. She didn’t want Eli to find it and yet she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. Even if they did decide to return to the States, going back to school seemed an indulgent and frivolous idea.

  During this time, Kate began tutoring a student after school hours. She wasn’t grateful so much for the money as she was for the time it filled in her head. Time she didn’t have to think about what to do next. Their teaching contracts ended in August and Eli was in the process of training his replacement while Kate was waiting for hers to arrive. She had not taken the option to renew the contract for another two years because it seemed like too much time, but now she wasn’t so sure. Eli was incapable of committing to one thing—he just wanted to marry and travel and pick up work where they could. He didn’t think about the practical things like travel visas and where to live. She felt too old for a hostel and not old enough for a real home.

  The worst times were when she couldn’t get rid of her father’s voice in her ear, when she would take out the applications and sit cross-legged on the bed while she idly fantasized about going back to school. She even went so far as to write an essay, request a transcript with her grades and LSAT scores, and fill out the applications to Columbia and NYU. When she posted them, she told herself it wasn’t so much about going back to the States as it was about having a plan, a plan she wouldn’t really follow through with.