They Only Eat Their Husbands

by Cara Lopez Lee

  But he said, “I’m not going to answer that question. That’s something you’ll have to decide for yourself. But you know what I think? I think you need to be with someone who doesn’t drink.”

  “But can’t we talk about this? I mean, I’m not saying you are. I know a lot of people drink wine, and that doesn’t make them all alcoholics.”

  “Okay, then tell me what you think. Like, what’s too much to you?”

  “Well . . . every time I come over here I see bottles of wine in the trash.”

  “You’ve been digging through my trash?!”

  “No, Sean.” I was growing impatient. “I throw things in the trash and the bottles are just there.”

  “And . . . ? It’s not like I hide them or anything.”

  “Nooo . . . But it seems to me . . . it seems to me that two bottles of wine a night is a lot.”

  “What else?”

  “I grabbed a sweatshirt from your closet last night and . . . ”

  “And you found some little bottles of alcohol?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you should leave.”

  “What?”

  “Look, I don’t have a problem with how much I drink, I’m not going to go to A.A., and I’m not going to quit. So if it’s an issue for you, you should leave.”

  “Do you want me to go?” I began to cry.

  “No, wait. You know what? You stay here and decide what you want and I’ll go!” In a sudden fury, he grabbed his coat off the rack and headed for the door.

  For the first time, it occurred to me to ask, “Have you been drinking?”

  “Of course. Don’t you know I’m a drunk?”

  I looked at his eyes and saw the telltale lack of focus. Why hadn’t I noticed before? With fierce determination, I said, “If you drive off right now, I’ll call the cops and give them your plate number and tell them you’re driving drunk.”

  He clenched his jaw. “What right do you have?”

  “What right do you have to get in a car and endanger my community? I think it’s only right for me to try to protect the people you might kill. I’m certainly not going to try to protect you from the consequences of your actions.”

  “You mean you won’t be an en-ab-ler,” he said. “Don’t feed me that twelve-step crap. I’ve been through it all with my dad. I know all the big words. I don’t need you to explain it to me.”

  “Why are you doing this? Do you really want to destroy what we have?”

  “It’s already destroyed. I told you not to get attached to me. I told you that you just didn’t know yet what an asshole I could be.”

  “Yeah, you were a real hero, the way you tried to save me.”

  Without another word, I walked out the door. As I made my way through the arctic entry, the hatred I’d long denied began to choke me. I don’t know whom I hated, or what, but the feeling was palpable, as if it were a parasite that had been lying within me for years, growing undetected as it fed on my humanity without my knowledge or consent.

  I’d run from Denver to Alaska, from Joe to anyone else, from Chance to Sean, all to avoid this feeling. But no matter how far I ran, I kept walking out the same door.

  Il Dolce Far Niente

  thirty-six years old—rome, italy

  Rome and romance might sound as if they were made for each other, but that doesn’t mean Rome is a good place for estranged lovers to start over. In this city of impetuous romantics and wine, Catholic rules and wine, summer heat and wine, everyone seems relaxed, and everyone seems ready to blow their tops. Sean wasn’t the first to unscrew the lid on his latent anger, and neither was I.

  I blame the tour guide.

  Even before we met the angry American ex-pat, my trust in tour guides was not high. I suspect many of them fall into this line of work because they never got that history degree they always wanted. While there are some good guides who know their stuff, there is no archaeological site, old building, or cultural phenomenon that can be described with one unarguable explanation. I’ve taken tours from different guides in the same country and heard conflicting interpretations of the past. And that’s with the licensed guides. With the unlicensed guides I wonder: are they making this stuff up just to mess with us, and how would we know the difference?

  Some fellow travelers I met on the train to Rome arranged today’s walking tour at a bargain basement price, with an unlicensed guide. When Sean and I arrived, our new friends were nowhere in sight. Our guide was the only person there.

  Susan the Angry American Ex-pat was a fast-talking, fidgety young woman, her lank hair impatiently knotted in a plastic clip, her brow creased in permanent irritation. Susan hated us before she met us. We were cutting into her exciting life as an ex-pat. Sure, our under-the-table tour would help pay for that life, but we weren’t paying enough to earn her gratitude.

  “Hello. You’re a little late,” she accused.

  Sean frowned and looked at his watch. “You said to be here at nine. It’s nine-o-two.”

  When four more people arrived between 9:05 and 9:10, she sighed heavily and scolded them for their tardiness. Our friends still hadn’t arrived; we later found out they’d been at a pub until three a.m. and were sleeping off a drunk.

  “Should we wait?” Susan asked.

  I gave her a measuring look. “Why don’t we give ’em five minutes?” She heaved another explosive sigh, threw herself onto a bench, tapped her foot, shook her head, leapt up, and barked, “Let’s just go! Now that we’re running late we’re already going to have to eliminate the first sight from our itinerary.” It was all of 9:15. Sean and I exchanged a look and jogged to catch up with Susan, whose punishing stride quickly put her well ahead of us.

  The pace never changed. On this walking tour we didn’t walk, we ran, or faced the wrath of the shouting Susan: “Pick it up guys, we’re running behind!”

  I muttered to Sean, “She probably moved to Italy after she lost her job as a prison guard.”

  Oddly, even though we only spent five minutes at most sights, the fact that we were behind schedule never changed. Maybe she shouldn’t have crammed fifteen sights into four hours.

  At the Trevi fountain we barely had time to toss coins over our shoulders to ensure our return to Rome, before Susan barked at us to “get moving!” At the Bocca della Veritá, or “Mouth of Truth,” we each swiftly stuck our hands into the mouth of the beast to prove our honesty, while Susan looked at her watch with exaggerated patience. I whispered in Sean’s ear, “Do you think that mouth only bites the hands off liars, or assholes, too?”

  At Circus Maximus, she asked us to gather around. As she began to talk, she cut herself off and abruptly insisted, “Would you all please stand on one side of me instead of scattered around, so I don’t have to keep turning my head!” Half the group scurried to obey. She then told us about Ancient Roman events at Circus Maximus, such as chariot races and feeding Christians to lions. She said the Romans used to put the heads of Christians on poles and set them on fire to use as torches for evening events. Sean whispered in my ear, “That’d be another way to keep her from having to turn her head.”

  As the group started moving again, I hung back and told Sean, “I just want to stick with her long enough to see the Mammertine Prison, because I don’t know how to find it on my own. Then let’s ditch ’er.”

  “Deal.”

  This brief exchange put us some twenty feet behind the group, so we sprinted to catch up.

  Susan shot us a baleful glare. “You guys, you really have to keep up!”

  “Lighten up!” Sean growled.

  Mammertine Prison was where Saints Peter and Paul each spent their final days, surrounded by thirty to fifty prisoners, chained in a tiny dungeon that felt crowded with just ten tourists. Susan explained that, in addition to other tortures, the guards used to dump urine and excrement on the
prisoners through an opening in the low ceiling. She showed us a place on that ceiling that’s been rubbed smooth by the touch of thousands of human hands, the place where, according to legend, Peter once bumped his head.

  “How did Saint Peter die?” one woman asked.

  “He was crucified,” Susan replied.

  “Many people believe he was crucified upside down,” I added, with a sardonic glance at Susan. “According to tradition, he said he didn’t deserve to be crucified in the same manner as Jesus.”

  “What about Paul?” someone asked. “How did he die?”

  Susan raised her voice so that it filled the cramped space, “Does anyone here know how Paul died?”

  An American tourist frowned at her and quietly informed our group, “He was beheaded.”

  At the Roman Forum, Sean and I made up some excuse about being tired, and dumped Susan.

  I’ll give her credit for one thing: our freedom felt so much sweeter after she’d taken it away. In the afternoon, we paid for a tour of the Coliseum with a licensed guide. After that, free of Susan’s clutches, we climbed up to the cheap seats to relax and neck a little. I sighed blissfully and said, “There’s nothing to stir romance quite like a place where men and beasts used to kill each other in front of huge audiences for entertainment.”

  But Susan had infected our mood. Or maybe, once Sean and I were alone together, it was only a matter of time before our past caught up with us.

  On the way back to our hotel, we started to cross a busy street near Piazza Venezia when I saw an oncoming car speeding toward us just fifty meters away. I grabbed Sean’s arm and pulled him back toward the curb as I gasped, “Look out!”

  He stumbled, then wheeled to face me, red with fury. “What the hell are you doing?!”

  I stepped back in surprise. “I’m sorry. I was afraid that car was going to hit you.”

  “I saw it, Cara! I would’ve made it!”

  “Okay, maybe. But I wouldn’t have. I wasn’t just afraid you’d get hit, I was also afraid of getting separated and losing you in the crowd. You have no idea how afraid I am of getting left behind.”

  “Don’t ever do that again! If anything, you put me in more danger.”

  “It was a reflex. I said I was sorry. Why are you so angry?”

  “Look, I don’t want to have a fight here on the street.” He shot an embarrassed glance at the crowd of pedestrians sharing our curb, but they seemed too busy looking for an opening in traffic to notice us.

  I lowered my voice anyway. “I’m not trying to fight. I’m just trying to explain—”

  “Okay, okay, I get it! Can we drop it now?”

  We walked in silence until we reached a quiet, unfamiliar intersection, where we realized we were lost. There were no people in sight. We stopped to stare at my map, then stare at our surroundings, then the map again, unable to find any clues to our whereabouts.

  “I think I see some familiar buildings that way,” I said, pointing down one street.

  “I think it’s this way,” Sean said, pointing down another.

  “Okay.” I followed him. But when we reached the next intersection, I said, “This feels even less familiar. I think it’s back that way.”

  “All right!” He threw up his arms. “So I’m wrong again, as usual.”

  “I never said that.” I was near tears. “I said ‘I think it’s back that way.’ Why can’t we just discuss our options, together, like partners?”

  “What’s to discuss? Nothing looks familiar to me. So let’s go your way.” He turned down the street I’d suggested, with angry-tour-guide strides.

  I followed after him, silent, sad. I felt like a child. I didn’t understand how to make this spiral of anger stop. Although we were walking down the street I’d suggested, I felt that I was being dragged down a street neither of us had chosen.

  A moment later, Sean’s pace slowed as he looked around with an expression of dawning recognition. “You know, I have to apologize, because you’re right. I recognize this street now.”

  Tears overflowed from my eyes and dripped onto the street as I shook my head. “Don’t you see? It’s not about being right. What hurts me is that you misunderstand my motives. You always think I’m trying to tell you you’re wrong, or tell you what to do, or trying to hurt you. It makes me feel like you don’t know me.”

  At that moment I felt lonelier and more invisible than I had in all my months alone. I thought, If Sean doesn’t know me, who can? We fell silent again until our hotel was in sight.

  Sean stopped and turned to me, startling me out of my thoughts. “I am sorry,” he said. “Not just because you were right, but because I know the fear of being wrong is something in me. I know it’s not you that makes me feel that way.”

  He held me and pressed his forehead to mine. I imagined the romantic picture we must appear to passersby. They couldn’t know how my heart ached. We’d only had a typical argument any couple might have, lost in a foreign city. Yet I feared that his wild-eyed anger, and my equally wild panic, presaged our doom.

  In the past couple of days we’ve bonded over our hunger for sex after a lengthy celibacy, our awe at the aged splendor of Rome, and our dislike of Susan the Angry American Ex-pat. But standing on that forgettable street, with nothing to occupy us except the connection between us, I began to wonder if that connection was made up of nothing but memories. Perhaps, together, we are going in the wrong direction. Maybe that’s why Sean pulled away when I pulled him back toward the curb.

  At dinner, he ordered a Coke and I ordered a carafe of wine—cheaper than a Coke. I thought about how he had seemed drunk with rage today on the streets of Rome and wondered if it had anything to do with drinking Coca Cola instead of wine. His volatility is that of a man on edge. We joked about our megalomaniacal guide and excitedly made plans for tomorrow. But I could feel the jack-in-the-box crouching inside each of us, waiting for the windup.

  lucca, italy

  Il Dolce Far Niente (The Sweetness of Doing Nothing): the byword of Italy, the antithesis of my life.

  We missed the fast train from Florence to Lucca by mere seconds, running to the platform just in time to see the caboose diminish to a disappointing silver dot. Twenty minutes later, we caught the next train, a clattering old bucket of bolts dragging a string of colorful boxcars. We were on the milk run, which stopped at every tiny Tuscan village along the way.

  I sulked. “I want to explore Lucca with you, not spend all day on a train.”

  Sean smiled. “I don’t care, Cara. Don’t you understand? I just want to make love to you in Italy, in every town we go to. In the meantime, isn’t this what il dolce far niente is all about? Taking it slow?”

  He was right. Caught up in the anxiety of fishing in the wastebasket to retrieve the relationship I’d thrown away, I’d forgotten that I was on a journey, and that the journey itself was the destination. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and looked around. Our car was nearly empty, except for a man who sat in the far corner with his back to us. Outside our open window the countryside breathed soft and warm, its chest rising and falling with fecund desire, down into tame green rows of vineyards and olive groves, up into wild green hills and stone cottages.

  As the heat rose, we moved to the open passage between the cars and stood in the warm breeze. Standing behind me, Sean reached around me and laid a bold but gentle hand on the curve of my breast. A slow smile rose from my belly, although I darted a pointed glance over my shoulder at the man in the corner. “No one can see us, Cara,” Sean breathed, tickling my ear. He kissed me deeply, until we melted back into our seats, talking and laughing and kissing in slow motion, as time stretched into a new shape.

  When we arrived in Lucca, we walked through its arched gates into a time that surely never existed. In reality, medieval times could never have been this idyllic or the people wouldn’t have felt the need to
build the high walls of earth and stone that encircle this city. Then again, in Lucca the walls have never been breached. Today, only locals are allowed to drive cars through the city gates, and only on a few select roads near the city walls. It’s a town of pedestrians and bicycles, heels and wheels stuttering across uneven stones. Whatever the time in the actual world, ever since we’ve arrived within this bewitched circle, the clock that ticks away the moments of our lives has stopped.

  Awakening here this morning I felt clarified, returned to an atavistic sense of self: my feet down to earth, my soul connected to the people around me, my thoughts open to the heavens. We woke when we felt like it and slid into a nearby piazza to drink cappuccinos, sitting at a little metal table under a great spreading tree dripping with white blossoms. We ate crème-filled croissants, and Sean laughed as mine oozed all over my hands.

  I read aloud from my journal about the Annapurna Circuit while he listened with rapt attention. After spending much of the past few months in solitude, in the company of others I’m more of a twittering clown than ever. The compulsion to explain my life feels as difficult to ignore as a persistent itch, and the results are as painful as scratching that itch until I bleed. While I was reading, I became aware of the inexhaustible sound of my own voice and felt the blood rise to my cheeks in patches of shame. Sean saved me from myself by touching my arm and pointing behind me.

  I stopped in mid-sentence and followed the direction of his finger to a Siberian husky drinking from a public water spigot. The insatiable dog lapped at the everlasting stream of water as if quaffing a canine elixir, while his patient master waited, and waited. Smiling, we both fell silent, watching people pass through the piazza and listening to the rise and fall of friendly, angry, happy, melancholy, flirtatious Italian voices. Could life really be this simple?

  Not for everyone. Our eyes were drawn to a shop across the piazza, where human limbs hung in the display window: prosthetic legs, arms, and hands of various sizes. “An Italian deli for cannibals?” Sean suggested. The disconcerting deli motivated us to move our own limbs while we still could.