Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties: A Novel

by Camille Pagán

  “Cheese, please,” I said, trying not to drool all over my fancy leather seat.

  “Excellent. And would you prefer flatiron steak with polenta, steamed sole with Italian herbs, or manicotti with spinach?”

  “Manicotti sounds great.”

  “Fresh bread?”

  “Yes,” I said, thanking God and whoever made the error that landed me in first class.

  “And may I bring you a drink?”

  My head was throbbing, probably from the champagne. But when almost in Rome . . . “A glass of red wine, please.”

  “Chianti, cabernet, or lambrusco?”

  “Chianti.”

  “The food can’t be beat, huh?” Jean’s voice traveled over the divider as the flight attendant was delivering my wine.

  I leaned forward so I could see her. She was tearing into a loaf of crusty bread. “I was just thinking that,” I told her.

  “Still can’t get over it myself. I waited sixty-eight years to take a first-class flight, and now I see that I should have sold a kidney back in the eighties if that’s what it took to get to the front. It’s rare air up here.” She grinned at me.

  “Yes, it is. Do you know what time it is, by any chance?”

  “Four in the morning. At least, that’s Eastern time. Three a.m. Central. You from Chicago?”

  I nodded. “You?”

  She shook her head, which sent her silver earrings shaking. “Had a connection from Detroit. I’m from Ann Arbor.” I must have looked dubious, because she added, “Since 1976, that is. I grew up in the south, in case you’re wondering about the accent.”

  “I was. I’m from Michigan and went to school in Ann Arbor. But my mother’s family is from rural Virginia. Lee County—you ever hear of it?”

  “Lee County!” she hooted. “I grew up just over the hill in Big Stone Gap.”

  I smiled. “Just over the hill” was how my mother had described anything between five and fifty miles away. No wonder Jean seemed so familiar. “Is that so?”

  “Sure is,” she said, looking awfully pleased herself. “So what’s bringing you to Rome, Maggie Halfmoon?”

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  Jean lifted her drink, which smelled like it was a hundred proof. “It’s kind of a long flight.”

  I eyed her for a moment. I didn’t know this woman, but I’d probably never see her again, so what did it matter if I told her the truth? “My husband called it quits on our marriage,” I admitted. “We were supposed to go to Rome together, but now I’m on a one-woman farewell tour. I guess it’s my way of sticking it to him while trying to wrap my mind around our divorce.”

  “Well, good for you!” declared Jean.

  Was it good for me? It certainly wasn’t good for Adam. Though I had saved him from flushing our $900 deposit down the drain, even if it had also required adding another $800 to his credit card bill.

  His bill! I thought suddenly. Ours. Our bill. Until we were divorced our finances remained a unit, and I would not feel bad about using a portion of them to do something for myself.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to take a hammer to life’s hard edges,” Jean added.

  “Isn’t that the truth.”

  “It is indeed. Anyway, I know a thing or two about farewell tours. I was married thirty-six years and went through a butt-ugly divorce that ended up with my husband in the morgue.”

  I must have looked alarmed, because she held up her hands. “Not to worry—I didn’t kill him. He was ten years my senior and had a heart condition that the doctors thought would do him in years earlier. My leaving was just the final straw, I suppose.”

  “Why were you splitting up?”

  “Let’s just say I was more than ready for a new chapter. It was terrible that it resulted in the end of Sam’s story—that took me a long time to move past. But here I am, and so it goes.”

  I hoped that my flying companion’s new chapter had not involved lying to her husband about a lover that she didn’t actually have. “What about you?” I asked. “What brings you to Rome?”

  “I’m spending two weeks in Rome. Then I’m heading to Florence for six months.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yes indeed. I’m a painter.” She reached into the bag at her feet and pulled out her phone. When she found what she was looking for, she held the screen up, revealing a photo of a canvas on which she had painted a dappled house with woods behind it. “Started in my fifties and have no intention of stopping,” she said, flipping to a photo of another painting just as stunning as the first. “I manage to sell enough of them to make a living, and now I’m off to Florence on a fellowship.” She laughed. “Judging by the expression on your mug, I’m guessing you thought they wouldn’t pay to send a wrinkled bat like me to Italy.”

  “I didn’t say that at all,” I said, grinning at her. “I’m thoroughly impressed.”

  “Well,” said Jean, instantly bashful, “I still can’t believe I made it happen myself.”

  We chatted off and on for the next few hours. She was good company; though Adam was never completely out of my mind, neither was he at the forefront while Jean and I were talking. After we touched down at Fiumicino Airport and deplaned, she handed me a card with her contact information. “I’m sure you’ve got big plans for your week,” she said, patting my arm. She was very tall, which I hadn’t realized until we were shuffling off the plane, and wore flowing linen clothes that made her look every bit the artist she was. “But if you want to grab a plate of pasta or a glass of wine, shoot me an email. It’s always nice to have company once in a while.”

  I thought of what the travel agent had said about the serendipity of traveling alone. “I’d love that,” I told Jean.

  The first few miles from the airport could have been almost anywhere. Through the window of my taxi I saw gas stations and strip malls, apartments and homes and schools, and flat wheat-colored fields.

  But with one turn I was on a road flanked by two towering, ancient stone walls. “Welcome to Rome,” said the taxi driver in accented English.

  The walls became shorter as the road rose and deposited us into the city. I don’t know what I was expecting—I suppose a modern metropolis with pockets of history here and there—but antiquity was everywhere. Most of the buildings were made of stone, and many were flanked with columns and were clearly thousands of years old.

  Still, I thought perhaps we were just passing through a charming neighborhood as the taxi made its way toward Piazza Navona, where I would be staying. I soon realized all of it was charming. Rome was a wash of cobblestone streets, colorful homes and restaurants and shops, government buildings with stucco walls and terra-cotta-tiled roofs, and more regal, ornate churches than I had ever seen in a single place. My spirits rose: in a city like this, it would be next to impossible for me to run out of things to do. And if I stayed busy, I might actually be able to enjoy myself instead of running around ruing Adam.

  I had reserved a room at a bed-and-breakfast hidden on a steep, narrow road off the center of a bustling neighborhood. Its door was tucked into the middle of a long wall; if the taxi hadn’t deposited me directly in front of it, I might have missed it. A friendly front-desk clerk named Danilo checked me in and showed me to my room.

  The room was small—as most hotel rooms in Rome were, the travel agent had warned back when Adam and I were planning to travel together—but it was bright, clean, and painted a lemon yellow that seemed to be the same shade as the sun streaming in through the wavy windowpane.

  After I got settled in and freshened up, I slipped on an old trench coat and headed out. I walked for a few blocks, soaking up the sounds of shopkeepers yelling Italian to each other and watching attractive people zip past on Vespas and in small, brightly colored cars. I remembered arriving in Barcelona with Adam decades earlier and being disappointed that the hotel we had chosen was in a sleepy financial district that might as well have been Washington, DC. This was the opposite of that. It seemed I had been dro
pped into an advertisement for an idyllic Italian getaway.

  There were dozens of different places to eat within a quarter-mile radius; after circling for a while, I settled on a cozy café. The café had two small tables positioned on either side of the entrance. The air was cool, but the sun was warm on my skin. When a woman behind the front counter indicated I was free to sit outside, I took the table to the right.

  I sat unattended to for a few minutes, and then a few more. A young couple sat at the table across from me, and the waiter who had been ignoring me walked over to help them. So my powers of transparency have followed me to Italy, I thought with defeat. I was about to get up when the woman behind the counter yelled out to the waiter. “Pietro!” she said, and rattled off something in Italian that was simultaneously angry sounding and beautiful. Then she looked at me with a gap-toothed grin. “Sorry,” she said. “Pietro is not good at his job, but he is the only one who showed up for work today.”

  I laughed, the tension instantly defused. “Thank you.”

  “What would you like?” she called, still behind the counter.

  “A cappuccino, please, and a ham-and-cheese panini.”

  “Bene,” she said, and nodded.

  It had only been a few hours since I’d had breakfast on the plane, but I was ravenous again and grateful when Pietro delivered my food. Along with the coffee and sandwich I had ordered, he placed a small plate with two chocolates in front of me.

  “A gift,” he said with a flourish of his hand.

  “Grazie,” I said, reciting one of the Italian phrases I had memorized in preparation for my trip. I looked down and saw that light brown espresso had been used to create a sun in the center of the foamed milk atop my coffee. It was almost too pretty to drink, but I was already jet-lagged and would need the caffeine if I was going to adjust to the new time zone. I lifted the small mug to my mouth, took a sip, and almost swooned as the milky coffee hit my tongue. What had I been drinking all these years? The cappuccino alone had been worth the trip to Italy.

  As I looked up, I realized the gap-toothed woman behind the counter was watching me. She grinned again. “Bene, si?”

  I had no idea how to say, “This is the flavor of heaven,” so I nodded, almost tearfully grateful, and said, “Molto bene.”

  It was very good indeed. And for the first time in quite some time, I felt that way, too.

  TEN

  When I woke the next morning, the sun was streaming through the window and I could hear birds chirping in the tree outside. If I were in a Disney movie, a couple of mice might have stopped by to help me pull an outfit together. But alas, this was my life, so I untwisted my nightgown from around my waist, rubbed my sleep-crusted eyes, and thought, Why would Adam choose nothing over me?

  Had I really been so intolerable? However humiliated and horrible I may have felt, I had been a good wife. I had always supported Adam and his ambitions, and had accepted him wholeheartedly for who he was, never pushing him to be or do what he could not.

  I’m done planning, I heard him say. Well, yes, I had made plans—doing so was integral to my sense of control, which I had been trying to gain since my uncontrollable childhood. Adam had been the one to point this out to me back when we were dating, and he had praised me for it because he was a planner, too. The man had three calendars—two electronic versions and a paper daybook because he was paranoid the e-versions would fail him—as well as a running mental outline of how his life was to unfold.

  Up until earlier that year, it had all been on schedule.

  It wasn’t as though he could claim he wanted fewer responsibilities. I paid our bills, made sure the fridge and cupboards were well stocked, and maintained communication with everyone in our lives, save Adam’s clients and employees, so that he wouldn’t have to unless he wanted to. I even had our car tires rotated and changed the furnace filter, for cripes’ sake.

  Now I was being punished for having made his life easier?

  A knock at the door broke through my thoughts. Just outside my room, my breakfast had been delivered on a cart. I wheeled it inside, expecting little, but when I removed the silver lid covering the tray, a small feast awaited me.

  The frothy cappuccino was almost as good as the one I’d had the afternoon before. I took a few sips and then topped a triangle of toast with hazelnut spread and ate every last crumb before moving on to a tiny cup of yogurt. The yogurt was thick and tasted just ever so slightly like honey. I ate a soft-boiled egg perched in a yellow porcelain eggcup, even though it pained me to crack its speckled shell with my spoon. I unwrapped a piece of chocolate (chocolate at breakfast—bless this place!) and washed it down with the rest of my coffee. After having spent months approaching food as a duty, my appetite had finally resurfaced. It had to be a sign that I was returning to myself.

  I had thought Italy would be a chance to escape my troubles. By my second day, it became evident they were still trailing behind me. When a thin, dark-haired tourist strode past me in the gardens at Vatican City, I found myself wondering if Jillian Smith had any idea she had been co-opted in Adam’s elaborate lie. Or maybe she had left him, I mused, pausing beside a manicured hedge to watch the woman walk away. He had said Jillian had wanted to sleep with him—but that wasn’t necessarily the same as wanting to break up his marriage. Maybe she was married, too, but was a compassionate cheater who didn’t chop down her family tree just because she wanted to stick her feathers in a new nest for a while. I didn’t know why I cared—she and he and they were all a thing of the past—but it seemed that maybe Jillian Smith would know what had driven Adam to this point.

  I spent the afternoon on the ancient-ruins walking tour, thinking more of the same. Our last stop on the tour was Torre Argentina, the Roman cat sanctuary where cats lazed about in the spot where Julius Caesar had gasped his last breath. A couple that had been canoodling every step of the way was necking against a wall with a large placard that said “Do Not Touch” in five different languages, and I was so busy trying not to think about when Adam and I had last made out like that in public—I wasn’t sure, but it was sometime during the previous millennium—that I missed the first half of the guide’s story of Caesar’s fateful betrayal. Of course, I already knew a thing or two about fateful endings (et tu, husband?).

  When I got back to my hotel that night, I emailed Jean to see if she wanted to get together the following day, with the hope that having an actual person to talk to would yank me from my mental sludge (the two and a half glasses of wine I’d had at dinner, however inexpensive and delicious, had been ineffective in that department).

  Jean was game, and so we agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant run by one of the city’s renowned Pizzaioli, or pizza makers. I had never been a big fan of pizza, which was sacrilege to a Chicagoan like Adam, but Jean had already been to the restaurant and said the meal I was about to eat would forever change the way I felt about the dish. And when I bit into a slice with a crisp, thin crust, a rich and almost floral tomato sauce, and dots of creamy mozzarella, I was indeed a changed woman.

  Now we were staring up at Trajan’s Column, the stone monument that had been built to commemorate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian War.

  “It’s amazing that a flourishing modern city rose around ancient ruins,” I mused to Jean.

  “Isn’t it just the darnedest thing?” she said. The column towered over a hundred feet, and every inch of it had been intricately carved with men and women fighting, working, and seducing each other. “That level of detail must have taken years to create! To think I get antsy if a painting takes more than a few weeks.”

  “That’s the human condition,” I said, moving out of the column’s shadow to warm myself in the afternoon sun.

  “Or maybe I’m just impatient,” said Jean as she nudged me in the side.

  I laughed. “Touché.”

  Trajan’s Column was nestled in ruins near the center of the city, and after walking around the area for a while, we headed west to t
he Tiber River. “How are you holding up, Maggie?” Jean asked when we had reached one of the arched bridges over the river. Like many other things in the city, the bridge was at once deteriorating and spectacular. “Managing to enjoy yourself in spite of what’s on the other side of the Atlantic?”

  I ran my fingers along the bridge’s stone rail. Below us, the Tiber’s taupe water rushed wildly. “Oh, you know.”

  “Don’t sugarcoat it, my friend,” said Jean.

  “I just keep wishing Adam had never told me the truth about Jillian. Now it’s like he and his fake lover are haunting my vacation.”

  Jean nodded. “I’m not the type to say everything happens for a reason. Oftentimes that’s just plain nonsense.” She had a faraway look on her face and didn’t speak again for a few minutes. “Sam and I—we had a daughter named Norah. She died of leukemia when she was three,” she finally said.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Jean, I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too. Sometimes I wonder if her death was what broke Sam’s heart in the first place. We went on to have two more children.” She fished her phone out of her purse and found a picture. “This is Sammy, our son,” she said, pointing to a tall man with Jean’s eyes. “And this is Hannah, our other daughter,” she said, pointing to a petite Asian woman. “We adopted her when Sammy was eight because Sam and I couldn’t manage to have a third child ourselves. Love ’em both like crazy, but I pray there’s an afterlife so I can see Norah again. Anyway,” she said, shaking her head as she slipped her phone back in her bag, “her passing is why I don’t believe in that whole ‘everything for a reason’ line.”

  I was about to respond when Jean bent to pick up a euro someone had dropped on the bridge. She stood, rubbed the two-toned coin between her fingers, and chucked it into the Tiber. “But if there’s one thing I do believe in, it’s wiping the crap off your shoes and finding a fresh patch of grass to stand on. Let’s get moving.”