“If you want, I can answer and tell him you’re out . . .”
“No, it doesn’t matter—grazie, my love. I’ll call him back in the morning. This curry really is delicious.”
Had she fallen for it?
Was I sufficiently believable?
Did she suspect?
Just forty-eight hours later I would discover that the correct answers were, in order, no, no, and yes. And that right there and then my wife had been transformed into Columbo turning even a shred of doubt into a hunt that ends only when his prey’s been nailed for his crimes.
The evening, however, passes without incident, which calms my worries. I watch Beauty and the Beast with the kids, and more important, I put my phone into airplane mode. So no more annoying phone calls. But that night I don’t sleep a wink, and in the bathroom, I delete all the compromising messages from the imaginary Dr. Moroni.
The next morning I call Signora Moroni and I discover the reason for the inconvenient phone call: she was hoping I could meet her after dinner because her husband had been called out of town for an unexpected gig. I tell her once again that I’m married, and perhaps more happily married than she is, and that I’ve decided to put an end to this kamikaze affair. That night, a few minutes before closing time, the lovely cheater shows up in the gym wearing a skintight tracksuit and we wind up having sex repeatedly in the shower stalls of the instructors’ locker room. I’m a man of healthy instincts. But above all, as you may have figured out for yourself, I am a complete moron.
The next day Isabella Moroni writes me an odd text message in which she seems to have forgotten about last night entirely.
“When can I see you? I miss you so much! I don’t know how to live without you.”
I distractedly reply, without really giving any thought to the odd aspects of the text, thus walking straight into a gigantic booby trap. We go on texting flirtatiously back and forth all day long. Exciting, fun, and—especially—explicit text messages. That night, when I get home, there is Paola waiting for me, standing in the middle of the living room like a three-headed Cerberus ready to sink his fangs into anyone who tries to enter. The minute I see her, I understand. As if there were a subtitle clearly stamped across the screen: YOU ARE A COMPLETE IDIOT.
I’ll admit it, I’d underestimated my wife’s intelligence. After the suspicious midevening phone call from the mysterious Dr. Moroni, Paola had put in a call of her own to the gym and had learned, from the conscientious and razor-sharp receptionist, that there was no Dr. Moroni, but there was a certain Isabella Moroni, who—well, well, well, how do you like that—had none other than me as her personal trainer. A quick search on Facebook revealed that this Isabella is not only attractive but arguably hot. I know, I know, I could have and should have put a different name in my cell phone directory, but it’s too late now, and even with the minimal precautions I’d taken I thought I was pretty damned smart. So now what did the Machiavellian high school teacher I married proceed to do? She went into my phone book and replaced Dr. Moroni’s phone number with her own, deleting Isabella’s phone number entirely. Every time I got a text message from my wife it was marked as coming from Dr. Moroni and I texted back accordingly, sinking deeper and deeper into the raging ocean of lies into which I’d dived headfirst. As she explains the various steps of the investigation, I desperately try to come up with a justification for all the text messages I’d sent that day. I decide to improvise and do my best to prop up the following creaky defense theory: “Isabella Moroni is a good customer at the gym and she’s fallen in love with me. I’m trying to let her down gently, but firmly. I just didn’t want to worry you about something of no real importance, amore mio.”
This pathetic appeal to the court’s better nature withered and died after no more than ten seconds, and so, in an impetus of dimwitted heroism—at this point completely thwarted by the strength of the overwhelming evidence of an extramarital affair—I decide to make a complete confession and throw myself on the mercy of the court.
Huge mistake.
The court is so angry it could spit.
* * *
In short, a full-blown tragedy with all the trimmings. Family and friends are dragged into the shipwreck of our marriage, especially Umberto and Corrado, under suspicion of having backed my play for months. The truth is that Corrado was completely aware of everything, down to the tiniest sexual details, while with Umberto, who was a close friend of Paola’s as well, I’d been rather discreet. I’d limited myself to the version that I’d found myself locked in a kiss with one of my clients at the gym, but I’d promptly nipped it in the bud. The most violent reaction is from my father-in-law, who, in Paola’s presence, reads me the riot act in nineteenth-century style, lecturing me on my violation of family values and betrayal of his daughter’s honor. He refuses to let me get a word in edgewise and watches impassively, standing like a majestic stag, as his daughter orders me out my own home.
* * *
That night I sleep at Corrado’s place, bunking on his pullout couch. His chaotic studio apartment is littered with objects, trash, scraps of food, and dirty laundry. It looks like the field at Woodstock after the concert.
* * *
The next morning I walk past the pastry shop, tempted to venture inside and try to put in a word on my own behalf, but I chicken out and turn to go. Oscar’s imperious voice stops me cold.
His first four words are explicit:
“You are a loser!”
I turn around. He’s standing in front of me in all his Romanness.
“It was a mistake . . . I know that—” I try to defend myself but he immediately cuts me off.
“I told my daughter that you were a loser.”
By now, the concept has become pretty clear.
“Yes, I have to admit—”
“Because no one but a pathetic loser would go ahead and confess!” he spits out, much to my astonishment. “Never, never confess. This is rule number one of all marriages; nothing else really matters. You can have three lovers simultaneously, forget birthdays, wedding anniversaries—all that’s fixable. But never confess. The priest ought to include it in the wedding ceremony.”
I was expecting yet another brutal tongue-lashing, and instead I’m presented with an unexpected display of male solidarity.
“Lucio, my lad, the truth is that sooner or later every man in the world has been forced to sleep on a cot in the office or in a basement bedroom.”
“Even you?” I ask.
“Even me. But don’t ask me the details. It’s a private matter I’d rather forget,” but then he can’t help himself. “She was a Ukrainian apprentice pastry chef. Twenty-four years old, I was forty-five. She couldn’t speak so much as a word of Italian, but she had a rack on her that had to be seen to be believed. Worthless in terms of making puff pastries or sugar icings, but she was good at everything else.”
I smile at the thought of Oscar struggling to woo a Ukrainian girl in broken English between a profiterole and a tray of beignets. Meanwhile, he goes on with his dissertation on the dos and don’ts of unfaithfulness: “Cheating in marriage isn’t a crime; it’s a genetic transcription error; it’s been a typo in male DNA since time out of mind. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’re a flesh-based computer and you’re programmed to cheat. The only difference is that some men have fewer opportunities, less personal charm, less time on their hands, and not as much disposable income. So now, because of a defect in your DNA, you’re sleeping on a cot in some friend’s apartment! Possibly for the rest of your life.”
I deeply appreciate the camaraderie of his confession, but I explain to him that in spite of all the emotional chaos and the fact that I’ve been kicked out of my home, Paola hasn’t said a word about divorce. At least not yet. But she then mentions it about two hours later, asking me to take all my possessions and get out of her life once and for all. I have no real cou
nterargument. It’s only fair, and after all, I brought it on myself.
I have only one question: “What about the children?”
“We’ll decide about the children later; for now I’ll tell them that you’ve been working late and sleeping at the gym.”
That strikes me as reasonable. Confident that this is just a passing tantrum, and considering that I’m not exactly a wealthy man, I decide to stay in Umberto’s studio apartment, given the impracticability of Corrado’s place. But I soon discover that my veterinarian friend likes to bring his work home, specifically a dozen cats and dogs that often clutter his 450 square feet of space. All I can do now is open my computer and start looking for a little one-star pensione not too far from the gym.
Then help comes in the form of an unexpected offer. From someone who by all rights ought to be on the opposite side of the barricades: my father-in-law.
* * *
Oscar offers me a place to stay in the back room of his pastry shop, at least until his daughter makes up her mind to forgive me, which by the way, just for the record, is not something she seems to have any intention of doing. Obviously, he’s giving me a place to stay without telling Paola, who’s convinced I’m staying in an imaginary and very affordable bed-and-breakfast in Trastevere.
So there I am, with a duffel bag shoved into the corner, doing my best to get some sleep while the Sinhalese assistant pastry chef bakes croissants, fills beignets, and decorates cakes. In the morning, I wake up wrinkled and oily. Every day I promise myself I’m going to find a new and more fitting place to live, but then, partly because of how close it is to the gym where I work and also because of Oscar’s kindness—he really does treat me like a son—I remain there, sleeping between a tray of flake pastries and a bag of superfine baking flour. I’m only allowed to see Lorenzo and Eva a couple of evenings a week and on Saturday afternoon, but I’m hopeful the situation will stabilize soon.
So, this was the perfect time to find out that I now had a new buddy by the name of Fritz.
MY BUDDY FRITZ
Actually, warning signs had started cropping up nearly a year before my affair with Isabella Moroni but they’d been roundly discounted and ignored. I remember very distinctly the first time Fritz rang my doorbell loud and clear. That afternoon, I was in the pool with my boys running some plays. Water polo is a demanding and manly pursuit, and my job as a coach is pretty thankless—just take a look sometime at a picture of the skinny weaklings who make up my team. We bob along, as I was telling you, midway down the rankings. My goalie Alessio, better known by his nickname Soap-on-a-Rope, never seems able to stop a shot, even by accident, while the center defender Martino, our team striker, is fast but cross-eyed. My assistant assistant coach, Giacomo, an autistic thirty-year-old who knows all the matches in the history of water polo by heart, isn’t much help in improving the performance of my ragtag team. Still, he manages to win the affection of one and all and he fits in perfectly in this Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. It’s not just a metaphor, my team is actually named the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. A name that says it all.
* * *
When I felt the first stab of pain to my belly, I was in the water and trying to teach Soap-on-a-Rope a play and I’d just shot the ball into the net when I felt a bolt of agony cut through me for a second. I file this passing pain away as a muscle cramp or a minor hernia and months go by before I think about it again. I’ve never really been sick in my life and the last thing I would think is that it could be anything truly serious.
How many times in your life have you heard words to that effect?
* * *
The fact remains that I start to feel sick more and more frequently; the sporadic stabbing pains are transformed into an almost constant minor pain; I’m no longer able to swim the way I used to. I stuff my face with analgesics and anti-inflammatory medicines, convincing myself that it’s nothing more than an annoying and extended cramp of my abdominal muscles (or what’s left of them). I tell Paola about it, and she insists on scheduling an abdominal sonogram, but I tell her that I’ve always had little lingering pains like this throughout my glorious athletic career, and that they always go away in time, as long as I rest up. To tell the truth, my affair with Signora Moroni isn’t really something I could describe as resting up, but the pain is still tolerable even during sex. I often think back on the abdominal sonogram I never got as a scene from the movie Sliding Doors.
What would have happened if I’d taken Paola’s advice?
Would I have lived for another ten, or twenty, or thirty years?
Or would I have been hit by a bus at the hospital entrance and killed instantly?
My personal sliding door slid shut right in front of me that day.
I just didn’t know it at the time.
* * *
Little by little I talk myself into believing that it’s not a muscular problem but rather an insidious and minuscule hernia. A simple operation would take care of everything, but I still decide to go on waiting, hoping against hope that one morning I’ll wake up just healthy. In the meanwhile, the symptoms just go on proliferating: I start to feel more tired than usual; one afternoon I throw up; and another time I go for weeks with an annoying low-grade fever. And each time I manage to find a logical explanation: “I’m just under a lot of stress lately”; “I shouldn’t have eaten what I ate last night”; “I must have gotten a chill in the pool yesterday, and 98.9 isn’t really a fever at all.” I still don’t connect the warning signs to that single lethal enemy.
The months fly past and in the meanwhile, as you know, my family life collapses and I wind up sleeping in the back room of the pastry shop. One rainy night in early March, I try to do my part and help Oscar as he places a large tray of chocolate muffins in the oven, but without warning, a stronger jab of pain than usual makes me double over. I drop the tray to the floor and let out a shout. Oscar and his Sinhalese assistant both prop me up, confused, and help me to a chair. I tell them that these pains have been bothering me for eight months now, recurring frequently, and that I’ve been doing my best to coexist with this damned hernia. For too long.
“Go have a specialist take a look at you,” Oscar suggests.
“Thanks, Oscar, but you’ll see; I’ll be all better in a couple of weeks.”
“That wasn’t a suggestion,” my father-in-law explains. “It was an order: go have a specialist take a look at you. It might even be an ulcer. A customer of mine died of an ulcer—it’s no laughing matter. One day he was sitting here eating a sweet roll with whipped cream and talking about A. S. Roma’s latest win, the next day he was in the cemetery, six feet under.”
Direct strike, ship sunk. Oscar managed to be both clear and direct, as always. The word “died” is a cold shower, and it finally persuades me to see a doctor, certain by now that it’s actually an ulcer. So I go and see Umberto. A veterinarian is, after all, a doctor of sorts.
Umberto’s waiting room is full.
Around me are sitting a little old cat lady, on her lap a carry crate containing a Persian; a thirteen-year-old boy with his mother and a chameleon; an austere man in his fifties with an obnoxious collie who resembles him to a T; and a pretty young tattooed woman in her early thirties with a mysterious basket on the seat next to her.
The cat lady stares at me curiously, then gives in to her overwhelming curiosity: “What kind of animal do you have?”
“I have ticks,” I reply with a sunny smile.
She can’t tell whether I’m joking or I mean it. In any case, she moves a seat away from me.
I’m the last one ushered into the doctor’s office. I immediately ask Umberto just what was in the tattooed woman’s basket.
“A python. Very fashionable these days,” he answers nonchalantly. Then he asks me the reason for this surprise visit. It’s the first time I’ve come to his clinic for professional reasons.
I exp
lain to him about the abdominal pains I’ve been experiencing for almost eight months now. I haven’t been to see a doctor in years and years. I’ve been avoiding the public health doctor whom I share with Paola to keep from alarming her excessively. The doctor is a friend of Paola’s and certainly would talk to her about it. I’m practically certain, I explain to Umberto, that it must be an ulcer.
My friend tells me to lie on my back and he palpates my stomach with expertise. I feel a sharp stab of pain. I can see that he’s a little worried.
“Does it hurt right here?” he asks.
The answer is clear from the grimace on my face.
As I get dressed, he explains that in his opinion this is neither a hernia nor an intercostal muscle strain, much less an ulcer.
“It’s a small lump,” he explains, “between the liver and the stomach; it’s hard to say with such a generic examination. It might be a lipoma, which in layman’s terms is an anomalous but benign clump of fat. I’d immediately order an abdominal sonogram. These days that kind of equipment can do a quick and accurate analysis.”
“In fact, Paola recommended the same thing a couple of months ago.”
“And she was right. As she almost always is, I should add.”
He scolds me for a while, the way only doctors and high school teachers know how. He’s right, I should have listened to my wife and kept that sliding door from slamming shut.
“I’d do a blood test too. You’ll see, it’s probably nothing,” Umberto concludes. “You almost never drink, you don’t smoke, and you’re even a former athlete!”
I have no difficulty understanding that he’s trying to keep from freaking me out.
I don’t like the smile on his face one little bit.
* * *
Skipping over the boring parts, here’s the report from the sonogram of my abdomen that was done two days later in a specialized medical clinic. I read the results while waiting for the doctor who’s going to go over them with me, and I immediately consult Wikipedia on my smart phone. I look for the two words that appear in bold after the phrase “the patient was found to present a . . . .” Those two words are hepatocellular carcinoma.
100 Days of Happiness Page 4