One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  Constance had spent much of their twentieth wedding anniversary shopping for a gown for their daughter, Marina, to wear to her graduation ball. Henry had been content to tag along, but one afternoon when the storm clouds gathered and lightning sliced the sky, he grabbed his wife by the hand and started running. She knew where they were headed and started to complain; she was dressed for shopping, not sprinting, but Henry would not be dissuaded.

  Rounding a corner onto the Via del Corso, a royal-purple velvet dress caught Constance’s eye, and she stopped to look at it, forgetting to let go of her husband’s hand. Coming to an unexpected halt, Henry bounced back and bumped into a woman who had also stopped to admire the dress. He was halfway through an apology when he recognized her.

  “Gina?” he said.

  Gina had weathered the intermittent twenty years better than any of them and now in her early forties was enjoying the prime of her exceptional beauty. She looked at him quizzically for a beat and said, “Henry?” and then scanning the panting woman next to him added, noticeably cooler, “And Constance.”

  Constance had known this meeting was a possibility from the moment that Henry had announced he was taking her to Rome for their anniversary. She should have been prepared for it but was not. All she could think to do was tell the truth.

  “Gina,” she said, “you look marvelous.”

  “You do!” exclaimed Henry with unbridled enthusiasm. “You look absolutely marvelous!”

  Later in the day, they returned to their room in the hotel, the same room where they had first made rapturous love on the blue-tiled floor twenty years before. Henry had booked it as a surprise, and Constance had done her best to look pleased but in truth had been hoping for more opulent digs, befitting the significance of the marital milestone they just reached together.

  As Henry began to undress her, she could tell from the goony look on his face that he was not undressing her, but Gina, and she turned to ice. Sensing the sudden change in temperature, Henry asked what was wrong. Constance said that nothing was wrong, but he insisted on dragging it out of her. As soon as she outlined her observation, Henry denied it with such ferocity that it was immediately apparent to Constance she had been correct. An argument erupted. The pretense of Henry’s indignation enraged her. Constance was not a violent woman. She had never struck her husband. But there was something about being in Rome that lent permission to unleash her passion. Objects were thrown. Ornaments, too. A plate narrowly missed Henry’s head and smashed on the wall behind him.

  Henry left and wandered the streets of Rome for some hours until he found himself outside Gina’s family palazzo. He rang the buzzer, and soon Gina was standing before him, wrapped in a red silk dressing gown. He had no idea what to say to her.

  “Henry,” said Gina, “what do you want?”

  “May I come in?” he said.

  Lizzie’s cry of disbelief sucked Constance back down the space-time wormhole, and once again she was back in the Largo dei Librari.

  “It wasn’t a very long affair,” said Constance. “We’d been going through a rough patch. Henry was”—she paused, searching for a word—“lost. And there was Gina, full of womanly compassion, ready to show him the way.” Constance smiled and shrugged.

  Lizzie sat mute, reeling. Constance took a deep breath and sighed.

  “Yesterday at the bridge,” said Constance, “it occurred to me that maybe the affair went on for longer than I knew. That maybe all these years—”

  “Oh, girlie!” Lizzie interrupted. “He loved you. He married you.”

  “That he wanted to be in Rome,” Constance plowed on, “so he could be near her.”

  There. She had said it. She had said it out loud. It did sound foolish and small as she thought it would, but nonetheless she was glad to admit it. Tears of relief welled in her eyes.

  In all their years, Lizzie had never seen Constance cry. She found a handkerchief in the sleeve of her blouse and handed it to her sister-in-law. Constance took it and blew her nose. “Ignore me,” she said. “I’m a silly old lady.”

  “No, darling,” said Lizzie, “this is your head doing you in. This isn’t real. This is—”

  “I know, I know,” Constance interrupted. She went to return Lizzie’s handkerchief and realized it was damp. “Oh, sorry. And the point is, there is nothing I can do about it. I will never know the truth. Henry is not here to illuminate us.” She tucked the handkerchief in her pocket.

  Lizzie reached over the table and took her hand. “I’m here to illuminate you,” she said, “and I can tell you that my brother loved you with all his heart and soul and every fiber of his being.” She knew she was being sentimental and that under normal circumstances Constance would have been repelled by sentimentality, but these were not normal circumstances.

  “Come on,” said Lizzie. “Let’s go look at that mosaic of yours.”

  “Pietra dura,” corrected Constance.

  “Whatever,” said Lizzie, unfolding herself from the chair. Constance called for the bill and staggered to her feet. They were both stiff and sore from sitting for so long. Lizzie paid the bill, and together they gathered up the Harrods bag and headed across the Largo to the steps of Santa Barbara dei Librai. Constance noted with irritation that they were ambulating with far less grace and vigor than they had been previously.

  SEVENTEEN

  Stazione di Roma Termini—Giovanni Paolo II

  I AM NOT A THING—A NOUN. I SEEM TO BE A VERB, AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS—AN INTEGRAL FUNCTION OF THE UNIVERSE.

  —R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be a Verb

  Alice and August returned to the guesthouse to collect her avocado-and-lime backpack. While August checked on the lads, discovering that they were all still indisposed, Alice went looking for Florentina, who eventually appeared in the kitchen, flushed and breathless.

  “I can see I was wrong about that boy,” said Florentina.

  “What boy?” said Alice.

  “You do not break his heart,” said Florentina. “He breaks yours.”

  As Florentina swept her into a farewell embrace, it occurred to Alice that her landlady smelled distinctly of sex. Indeed, had Alice walked six paces to her right and opened the pantry door, she would have discovered Florentina’s Web designer waiting in priapic splendor to conclude another extremely creative consultation with his client.

  Outside, August swapped his motorino for Rick’s. They were both the same ubiquitous beige color, but as Alice had earlier pointed out, Rick’s was bigger and, more important, it had a different license plate. August felt a little uneasy about driving Alice across Rome with her distinctive flaming hair waving behind them, but she solved the problem by tucking her red locks into a helmet. Traversing the Centro Storico, they made it to Roma Termini without incident and pulled up outside the monumental wall of glass that fronted the long lobby of the station. August watched their reflections as Alice alighted, took off her helmet, and handed it back to him.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Not knowing what else to do, he extended his hand. As she took it, he said, suddenly feeling like he was appearing in some old black-and-white movie, “I’ll never forget you.”

  “Me neither,” said Alice. “Whatever your name is.” She let go of his hand and asked, “What is your name?”

  August had given her his heart. It suddenly seemed strangely important to him that he not give her his name as well.

  “Let’s do this right,” he said. “You head off through those doors now, and you don’t look back.”

  Alice nodded. She hitched up her backpack so that it rested more comfortably on her frame. “Just do one thing for me,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Go to Paris and paint.”

  “That’s two things,” he said, “but sure.”

  Alice smiled, and he smiled back. She turned and walked away. As he watched her disappear into the anonymous stream of commuters, it occurred to August that she was the one who should go to Pari
s and paint; she was the one who saw seventeen colors in the green of his eyes; she was the one who could see the kaleidoscopic universe around her; she was the one with the gift. He hoped that she would realize that one day.

  Alice walked under the cantilevered concrete canopy that extended over the entrance, through the crowds in the great hall, to the ticketing office where she waited in line and collected her prepaid ticket to Florence. In a daze, she found her way to platform twenty-two and boarded the silver bullet-shaped train with its dashing red-and-dark-gray stripes. In carriage number four, she hoisted her backpack into the overhead locker and slumped into her maroon leather seat, wishing she’d never met Pea Green and cursing the broken certainty that lay like Humpty Dumpty at her feet. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men …

  Looking out the window, she was caught between studying her own dull reflection and watching the world that was bustling by with complete disregard for her ennui. A young man passed the window. He looked just like Pea Green. Alice sat up, suddenly alert. The young man returned, looking in the windows. It was Pea Green.

  He waved. She waved back. She waited as he boarded the train and made his way to her. Her heart was pounding so loudly she thought the other passengers would hear. Pea Green dropped into the empty seat opposite her.

  “Okay, so here’s the thing,” said August. “Imagine it’s ten, fifteen years from now, and you’re happily married to the tosser—”

  “He’s not a tosser.”

  August pressed on. “Okay, so let’s call him the Not-Tosser. And you’re married, and you’re a famous artist because you went to Paris and painted, by the way, not me, but you’re blocked and you can’t work. So you try skipping and it helps, but it doesn’t really do the trick. But the skipping does remind you of that English guy you met in Rome all those years ago, and suddenly—wham—it hits you, that’s why you’re blocked. Unconsciously, you’re wondering what would have happened if you’d got off the train and spent one more day in Rome with him.”

  Alice swallowed, and August could see he was making inroads. He kept going. “Wouldn’t it be nice to know for certain that I’m the wrong person and he’s the right person? To be sitting in your studio in fifteen years’ time painting your head off without a doubt in the world about the decisions you made?”

  “I’m meeting him in Florence in two hours,” she said.

  August shrugged. He kept staring at her.

  “We’re supposed to be choosing our engagement ring,” she added.

  “I happen to know of an excellent invention called the cell phone,” he said.

  Outside, the conductor blew a whistle. There was a garbled announcement in Italian over the intercom. Departure was clearly imminent.

  August gave it one last shot. “In the grand scheme of things…”

  For a split second, Alice glimpsed what he would have looked like as a little boy.

  “Meet me out the front,” said New Alice, “where you dropped me off.”

  August ran to the parking lot. He forgot where he had left the motorino, abandoning it, as he had, in a moment of sudden resolve. He had no doubt he was a comical sight, his plight evident to anyone who saw him darting about the sea of cars and bikes like a headless chicken. He told himself to calm down. She wasn’t going to get on a bus or something just because he wasn’t there immediately. Finally, he spotted the motorino, right where he had left it, parked haphazardly in a line of other illegally parked motorini. He slipped his hand into his jeans’ pocket, but there was no key. He put his hand in the other pocket, but there was nothing there either, just a few English pence and an empty chewing-gum wrapper. He checked the ignition of the motorino, but the key was not there. Had he dropped it at the station somewhere or left it on the train? He started to run back to the station when he realized that there was something in his hand. It was the key. You really must calm the fuck down, he told himself.

  August returned to the motorino and drove it back to the place where Alice had disembarked. He could not park on the exact spot because a great caterpillar of a tourist bus, with side mirrors protruding like antennae, had stopped there. So he pulled in behind it; it was close enough. Alice was not there yet. He looked beyond his own reflection in the wall of glass to the mass of commuters inside. He knew the first thing he would see would be the top of the green backpack bobbing through the crowd.

  He waited. He waited for the bus to disgorge its passengers, for the passengers to collect their baggage from the underbelly of the bus, and for the bus to drive away. He shuttled forward; now he was in the exact spot. It did not occur to him that Alice may have changed her mind, that she may have heaved her backpack from the luggage rack and dragged it down the aisle as far as the door before suddenly realizing the mistake she was making. He did not imagine for an instant that she might, in fact, have returned to her seat and could now be watching the outer suburbs of Rome sweeping past the window, that she could well be on her way to Florence into the arms of her fiancé.

  Alice returned to platform twenty-two. She had tried to call Daniel from the main hall and had actually connected, but the din of the other commuters and the almost constant stream of announcements made it impossible to hear anything. Now that the train for Florence had departed, the platform was comparatively quiet, although the announcements continued to blare forth. Old Alice was determined not to begin this new episode without speaking to Daniel. New Alice counseled her to let the wild rumpus start and warned that her Englishman would not wait forever, but Alice knew this was not true. She was certain that he would be out there waiting for her.

  Alice tried to imagine where Daniel would be. Her first call had connected, so he must be off the plane and was probably on his way to the hotel or at the hotel already. Or maybe he had managed to get a flight to Rome and had come here to surprise her. In a hot panic, she spun around, expecting him to appear behind her, arms outstretched in greeting. He was not there. Nor was he, she reminded herself, the type to change his plans without telling her. Then again, neither was she until very recently.

  On her sixth attempt, Alice finally connected with Daniel. They were both on US cell phones, so she imagined her Hi traveling from Rome to her service provider in New York, to his provider in New York and on to Florence. Then his distant Hi making the journey in reverse. She trotted out the bald-faced lie she had prepared with an ease that surprised her. She had missed the train, she said, and because it was tourist season could not get a seat on another until tomorrow morning. She was relieved to hear the irritation in his voice because it meant that he believed her.

  Had she forgotten that he could only get three days off? He wondered aloud whether he should try to get a train down to Rome. Alice suggested he go to the hotel and enjoy some me-time instead. She cringed at how silly this sounded, but it seemed to appeal. He even proposed that he spend some time scoping out engagement rings before she got there. “Great idea,” said Alice with her shoulders hunched guiltily around her ears.

  Finally, August saw the green backpack bobbing through the crowd toward him. Alice appeared, looking serious. He knew what she had been doing even though she had not told him.

  “How’d it go?” he asked as she approached.

  “Fine.”

  “What did he say?”

  “If this is going to work,” she said, “we’re not talking about him.”

  He handed her a helmet. She bent as far forward as she could wearing a backpack, scraping her hair up her neck. She fed a knot of red hair into the helmet and straightened back up again.

  “So what are we allowed to talk about?” he said.

  “Don’t do this,” she said.

  “Do what?”

  Alice hoisted her backpack, getting it into a more comfortable position for sitting on the motorino. “You wanted more time so you could pick a fight with me?”

  “Is this what this is?” he said. “Are we having our first fight?”

  Alice punched his left shoulder wi
th her right hand. Hard, just like her brother used to do to her when they were younger. She had never hit anyone like that in her life, not even in retaliation.

  “Ow,” he said as if it didn’t hurt, even though it did.

  Alice mounted the motorino and put her arms around him. Into his ear she said, “I lied to him. I told him a lie.”

  This was not a confession, August knew. This was an announcement: I am the type who lies to the one who loves her; beware. He knew she was pointing to her capacity for dishonesty, and he knew he should pause to consider this. But the truth was, if she had whispered, “I killed him,” he would have found a way to live with it. Right now, she was with him, August Clutterbuck, and the world was filled to overflowing with this astonishing and glorious fact. He kicked the motorino into life.

  “So where to?” he called over his shoulder.

  “I dunno,” she said. “I thought you had a plan.”

  EIGHTEEN

  La Barbuta

  HE HAD DISCOVERED A GREAT LAW OF HUMAN ACTION, WITHOUT KNOWING IT—NAMELY, THAT IN ORDER TO MAKE A MAN OR A BOY COVET A THING, IT IS ONLY NECESSARY TO MAKE THE THING DIFFICULT TO ATTAIN.

  —Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

  Meg hailed a taxi in the Campo de’ Fiori and, consulting Stephanie’s barely legible scrawl, instructed the driver to take her to the Ciampino airport. She decided not to disclose the specific destination of La Barbuta, just in case she spooked the driver. She would simply relay Stephanie’s directions until it was too late for him to refuse to drive into the gypsy camp.

  The driver, Aldo, who was fluent in six languages and held a master’s of philosophy in literatures of the Americas from Trinity College Dublin, detected her American accent and calculated that, with tip, the trip would pay for his date tonight with Rosa, his on-again off-again girlfriend. He was a little surprised that Meg did not have any luggage, not even a purse, but he knew that she would soon be explaining why. They were very gregarious, these Americans; they loved to natter, especially about themselves.