The Rome Affair

“Rachel.”

“And I am Roberto.”

The singers broke into a slow, haunting song. The strum of their guitar wafted and lilted until it surrounded the two of us, as if the song was being played for us.

“Rachele, Roberto,” he said, gesturing to me and back to himself. “This is meant to happen.”

I clasped his hand tighter.

Roberto and I sat on the steps for an hour or so, talking softly, about Rome, about art. When the singers were chased away by the polizia, he stood and took my hand again. He led me away from the steps and began to guide me over the cobbled streets.

His apartment was only a few blocks away on Via Sistina. The short distance meant I didn’t feel scared or pulled too far. Inside, his floors were pine-planked. His artwork—canvases done in red—hung from the walls.

He stood behind me as I surveyed the place.

I noticed a small canvas on an easel, and I walked over to it. The painting was a series of thick, wine-red slashes, with small remnants of black beneath them. And in the center, amid the chaotic red, was a lighter area. On closer inspection, it was the profile of a woman, her face downcast.

Roberto came to my side. “It is you.”

I laughed. “Oh, you painted this tonight, after you met me?”

“No, I painted this ten, maybe eleven years ago. I did not know this woman I painted. She was here.” He tapped his forehead. “Then I see you in the ristorante tonight, and I know. It is you.”

“Come on.” I laughed again. “How many women have you told that story to?”

“Only you,” he said simply. He nodded at the painting. “It is you.”

On closer inspection, the woman’s hair was shoulder-length, like mine, her eyes small but lashes long, also like mine. And there was something about the high curve of the cheekbone that made me feel, if only for a sliver of a second, as if I was looking in a mirror.

“It is beautiful,” I said. “Bellisimo.”

He moved behind me. He put his hands on my shoulders, then lightly drew them up my neck, into my hair, lifting it. “No. You are beautiful.”

He leaned down, his breath in my ear. “Bellisima,” he said. “Bella.”

He repeated it over and over—Bella. Bella. Bella. His hands curled in my hair. His lips, warm and so soft, touched my neck. Bella. Bella.

It became a mantra he spoke as he led me to an old-fashioned brocade day-bed, right below one particularly vivid canvas. Slowly, gently, he unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it from my body, unwrapping me the way he might a precious painting.

When he lowered himself over me, Nick was in that room somehow. When I felt the full weight of Roberto’s body, I was punishing Nick—and myself. But I loved it. I craved it. I needed it.

In the morning, I let myself quietly into the hotel room. I had felt dreamy and languid tiptoeing through Roberto’s apartment door, but now the bright light of morning—God’s flashlight, my mother used to call it—made me feel exposed and slightly seedy.

I expected the room to be dark, Kit still with her man from the French embassy or else buried deep in her covers. Kit was a notoriously late sleeper, always the last to get up in the morning, but the room was filled with light, and there was Kit. She sat at a round table in front of the opened French windows, coffee and a basket of rolls in front of her. Outside, Rome was starting to awaken, the sun growing more gold over the domes of a thousand churches.

“Morning,” Kit said. She was wearing one of the hotel robes, and her hair was wet and combed back. She looked clean and fresh.

“Hi.” I stood uncertainly, then stepped inside and let the door fall closed behind me.

I wanted, suddenly, to throw my bag on the bed and rush into a telling of my night, the way I used to when we were younger. I wanted to tell her what it was like with Roberto on that daybed, how we’d moved to the floor, a couch and finally his bed. I wanted to laugh, to say, “I’ve had two hours of sleep!”

But I stalled. I couldn’t jump into a story of my infidelity, and how I’d quickly joined Nick’s ranks, when I’d been so shocked at his actions. Also, it felt somehow wrong to give any of the sexual details. Marriage had sealed my tongue to those kinds of conversations. And finally, I realized right then that the years of geographical distance between Kit and me had created some emotional distance, too.

“How was it?” Kit said.

I took a few steps inside. “What?” I turned my back to her, setting my purse carefully on a dresser top.

“Rachel, it’s me.”

I turned. Her violet-blue eyes looked concerned, and I noticed lines around those eyes that didn’t used to be there years ago. But then, I had such lines, too. Somehow the fact that we were both growing older made what I had just done seem embarrassing, unseemly.

“What do you mean?” My voice sounded false to my ears.

She pushed aside a cup of espresso. “Where did you meet him? Someone from your meeting?” Her voice was full of kindness, and I felt relief at the friendship I heard there.

I shook my head.

“Someone you met at dinner?”

I hesitated once more. An overwhelming desire to sleep covered me like a wave. I was too tired to figure out a way to lie to Kit.

I nodded. I searched her face for disappointment, but there was none.

“So how was it?” she asked again.

“Unbelievable. Amazing.” The words were out of my mouth before I’d had a chance to consider them.

“Well, you got back at Nick,” she said quietly.

“It wasn’t like that.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be harsh. It’s just that he deserves it.”

Silence trickled into the room. Outside, on the Spanish Steps, the sound of a woman’s laugh rang out.

“Sorry,” Kit said again.

“No, it’s all right.” In truth, I liked that Kit was protective of me. “It’s really not about getting back at him, though.”

But of course it was. Because I thought he was probably doing it again. Right now, possibly. I thought about telling Kit my suspicions, but my shame stopped me. Before I’d come to Rome, I had been sick of being the one who was right for so long, the one who sat on the moral high ground of our marriage. With regret seeping in, I now wished to return to that spot.

Kit studied me. I sat on the bed, feeling the satiny-smooth cotton sheets beneath my legs. I thought of Roberto’s hands on those legs, on my thighs, parting them.

“How was your night?” I said.

Kit smiled. “Wonderful. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you got back.”

“It’s okay. I was gone all day.”

“Wait until you meet this guy.”

“What’s he like?”

“Gorgeous. Sweet. Perfect.” She chuckled. “But you’ll have to judge for yourself.”

“You’re seeing him again?”

She gave me a beseeching look. “If it’s okay with you. I mean, I told him no, but he’s called three times.”

“Wow. That’s great.”

“Yeah. He’s a doll. I mean, I really feel like he could be someone special.” Her eyes were bright with hope.

“Well, of course, then. You should see him.” Kit was always looking for the man who could make her happy, the way her family never had.

“Join us,” Kit said. “We’re going to some emperor’s house. Nero, I think. I guess it’s really interesting. It’ll be great.”

“No, thanks. I’m just going to sleep.”

“No, come with us!”

We went back and forth, the exhaustion crawling over me, until Kit finally relented.

We sat silently for a few moments, the sun surging through the windows and filling our room.

“Are you okay, Rachel?” Kit said at last.

I felt something trembling inside me. “It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you know. Nick with that woman and now…” I raised a hand, as if I was in a classroom, identifying myself. I felt a strange, mortifying pride at what I’d done, but more than anything I felt twisted with guilt.

“I guess so,” Kit said simply.

“Did Nick call?”

Kit shook her head.

But he did.

The bleat, bleat of the phone startled me out of sleep like a smack to the head. It took me a few long moments—the persistent bleat still sounding—for me to remember Rome. And Roberto. I thought he was calling me again. And, in that instant, I was happy. Schoolgirl, pulse-skidding happy.

I rolled over with a little grin, and I lifted the phone.

“There she is!” Nick said, as if he’d been calling me over and over instead of the other way around.

I froze.

“You there?” he said.

I pushed myself to a sitting position, leaning against the tufted headboard. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“How’s Italy?”

Why did he sound so cheerful? I could only think of one reason.

“Where were you yesterday?” I asked, my voice steely.

“When?”

“Yesterday. All day. I called you at the office, and they said you were golfing. I called you at home and on your cell a million times.”

“You left one message,” Nick said.

“One message on your cell, and one at home.”

“Right. And by the time I got them, it was the middle of the night over there. I just woke up, and I called you first thing.”

I glanced at the nightstand clock. Two in the afternoon, which meant it was six in the morning at home. “What were you doing all day that you didn’t have your phone on?”

“I…I was working.”

“You weren’t working. I told you I called your office.”

“Yeah, well, I was working on something here.”

“What?”

He sighed.

“Nick, where were you?”

Another silence. “I don’t want to tell you.”

I laughed, harsh and bitter. “I bet.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I think you know.”

“Rach, c’mon.”

“No, you c’mon. Again, Nick? Again? I’m gone a couple goddamned days, and you’re at it again? Who was she? Why don’t you just make us a grand cliché and tell me it was your nurse?”

The silence now was eerie. Do not speak first, I told myself, aware, vaguely, of how childish this was but not caring.

I heard him breathe out, hard. “Rachel,” he said in his practiced, doctor’s voice—composed despite disaster, “I can’t tell you what I was doing. It’s a surprise.”

“What do you mean?” I tried to untwist my legs from the sheets.

“I took the day off work. I put my pager on in case the office called, and I turned off the other phones because I was doing something for my wife.”

My wife, my wife.

There was too much sun in my room. Too damned hot. I stood, intending to close the drapes, but my brain seemed to slosh about in my head. I nearly lost my balance, as if I were standing on a boat in rough seas. And then there was my husband. Talking still, saying something, far away. He sounded calm, but angry and disappointed. I could tell. It was the way I’d sounded for much of the past year.

“Rachel?” he said. “Are you there?”

I sank onto the floor right next to the bed. I noticed the black satin sandals I’d worn the night before. They lay where they’d been kicked off. Carelessly. Wantonly.

To believe or not to believe.

“Why don’t you have some faith in me?” Nick asked on the phone.

I retorted something about losing my faith in Napa. I said I thought I’d left it at a restaurant.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. I kept glancing at the sandals—glittering black on the thick cream carpet. I chucked them across the room, out of sight.

I heard the distant beep of Nick’s pager. “Shit,” he said. “I’ve got to get to the O.R. Rachel, listen. Enjoy your last day over there, and we’ll talk about this when you get home. I’ll show you then.”

“You’ll show me?”

“I’ll show you my surprise.” He paused. “And I’ll show you how much I love you.”

I took a breath. Had I been breathing since the phone rang? It didn’t seem so.

“I do love you,” he said.

I rolled that around in my mind. It seemed true from my side as well, despite everything. “I love you, too,” I said grudgingly.

As I hung up, there was a rap at the door. “Uno momento,” I called, pulling on a robe.

The front desk clerk, Bettina, stood outside the door. “For you, Rachel.” She held aloft a foot-tall square wrapped in brown paper. “Delivery.”

“Grazie.” I wondered if this was somehow the surprise from Nick. “And have you seen my friend? Kit?”

Bettina grinned. “She is with Frenchman, I think.”

“Okay, grazie.” If Kit was here, she could help me decide. To believe or not to believe.

I took the package to the table near one of the windows. Outside, it was another sunny Roman day, the Spanish Steps loaded with backpacking tourists holding cameras. Today was windy, though, and people held on to hats, as well, the women’s hair flapping in the wind.

There were no markings on the package except for my name and Il Palazzetto written in black marker in a hand I didn’t recognize. I turned it over. Masking tape held the paper together and it easily came undone. Inside was the small painting from Roberto’s apartment. The one of the woman he’d said was me.

I couldn’t pull my eyes away. Why had he sent this? I turned over the canvas and saw a note taped to the back. It was a small rectangle of heavy ivory paper, folded in half.

Mia Rachele,

You have only a small time in Roma. I would like to spend that time with you. But if you cannot, then I want you to have this. Please take it to Chicago and remember me. I will remember you.

Roberto

If I chose to disbelieve my husband’s words, I should pick up the phone now. I should call Roberto, and not only thank him for the painting but tell him to meet me.

I set the painting on the table. I opened the windows and leaned out, hoping to catch a little sun on my face, and with it, a decision about Nick. Another one. Hadn’t I leaped over enough moral and mental hurdles to get to this point? Deciding to forgive him. Deciding to trust him again. Now he was asking the same. And I was no longer the innocent.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured the gallery where I’d met Nick during a spring art festival in Bucktown, the same gallery where we had our wedding reception three years later, when Nick’s brother and our parents and our friends gathered together in that high-ceilinged room filled with jazz and champagne and sun and art.

I thought of the way Nick always looked at me, especially when I entered a room or a conversation. Nick had a way of furrowing his brows when he listened to someone speak. He was, I’d always said, one of the best listeners I’d ever met. He truly wanted to hear what someone was saying. He wanted to learn, to understand. When I spoke though, the corners of his mouth turned up in a small grin. His brown eyes softened and filled with pride.

And then I thought of Nick’s eyes and the way he’d looked at me that night in our kitchen. The night he’d told me. After his confession, he’d held me lightly by the shoulders, as if I was a balloon that might float away. He’d bent down until our eyes were even. I made a mistake, he’d said. The most awful, most cruel mistake. But I will never do that to you again. I promise. I could see the anguish in his eyes, the paleness of his skin making his few freckles stand out in sharp contrast. I promise, Rachel. I promise.

To believe or not to believe.

I crossed the room and found Roberto’s note. I fingered it. I remembered his fingers on my body. I thought of Nick’s words—I was planning a surprise for you…My wife.

I thought of our bungalow on Bloomingdale Avenue. I thought of the family we planned on having.

I took the note to the window. Outside the wind was still buffeting the people on the steps. I held my fist outside. I unclenched my hand. I watched the scrap of white float into the Roman air.

5

Nick was waiting for us at O’Hare when we landed, which meant he’d left the office early. I wondered if this was because he loved me, as he had said so many times over the past few months—as he’d said on the phone when I was in Rome—or because he felt guilt that he’d done it again.

“Golden Girl,” Nick said, when Kit and I reached his car.

I smiled. No matter what was going on with us, I always loved when he called me that. He was wearing a suit with a silvery tie and the cuff links I’d given him on our first anniversary. He looked the part of the elegant surgeon. I felt a rush of pride.

He hugged and kissed me, then turned to greet Kit. “How was the trip?”

“Great,” she said.

Kit was wearing the earrings her Frenchman, Alain, had bought for her. They were made of little pieces of green glass, like tiny, emerald chandeliers, and they made her hair gleam a more beautiful auburn.

Looking at those earrings, I remembered how I’d felt after Nick gave me my square sapphire engagement ring. I’d shown it to Kit, who’d expressed happiness, but I knew she’d been envious, wondering why she wasn’t the one getting married.

Now the tables had turned. Alain had told her he was being transferred back to Paris, and he would fly her there when he was apartment hunting. Kit was already envisioning herself in France and I envied her for the clean, simple beginning of it all.

“Did you have fun?” Nick asked Kit.

Her eyes shot to the ground, and she nodded. She looked guilty.

I wondered if Nick noticed, because if I was reading her right, Kit was feeling guilty because of me. She knew about Roberto. I hated myself for putting her in a position where she had to keep quiet about this. But then, wasn’t that what female friendships were based on—the ability to hear the other’s dirty little secrets, to sympathize with her, to tell the other the honest words she needed to hear, to build her back up, to make sure she no longer felt shame at what she’d done, and then to forget, forever, those secrets?

“Your chariot,” Nick said, gesturing to the navy-blue BMW he’d bought last year. “Let me get your bags. And what’s this?” He nodded at Roberto’s canvas, covered again in brown paper, which I’d carried on the plane.

“A painting.” My voice rang high. “A souvenir.”

Nick held out his hand. “I’ll put it in the trunk.”

“No, no. I’ve got it.”

Kit’s eyes shot away from us.

The ride home was filled with my chatter. Nick smiled when I told him about our delicious first-night dinner in Rome; he groaned and said, “Oh, babe,” when I recounted the meeting with the Rolan & Cavalli architects. It felt good to be with him, but I couldn’t ignore the flashes of Roberto, nor could I forget the questions—Nick, what were you doing while I was gone?

The whole time, Kit was silent in the back seat. I turned every so often and tried to draw her into the conversation, but she only smiled back, a sad, resigned kind of smile, and I assumed she was embarrassed for me. Or maybe she was thinking about her mother, about the fact that the vacation was over and it was time, again, to face the hard realities of her illness. When we dropped her off at her mom’s place—an old apartment building in River Forest that looked more like a roadside motel—I couldn’t help but remember the house they used to live in, before Kit’s dad died. It was only a few miles away, just down the street from where I grew up, but it was a well-tended Georgian, with a huge oak in the center of the front lawn.

“Thanks, Rachel,” Kit said to me. “It was a great trip.” She hugged me, avoided Nick’s eyes and headed quickly for the door.

I glanced at Nick, but if he saw something strange in Kit’s behavior, he didn’t comment. “Ready?” he said, putting the car in gear. “I’ve got something to show you.”

We exited at Armitage and wound our way to Bloomingdale Avenue, a tiny, brick street west of the city. On one side of the avenue stood the stone wall of an old rail line, the top of which now served as a planter for trees and bushes and, quite often, an impressively charming display of weeds. On the other side, a few turn-of-the-century bungalows, like ours, mixed with large, single-family homes built in the past five years.

Many Chicago residents knew nothing of Bloomingdale Avenue. After living in the city for years myself, I’d never seen it. But Nick and I took a walk one day during our engagement. We were tired and nervous about getting everything done before the wedding, and we wanted to simply be outside. It was chilly but sunny that autumn day, and we ambled this way and that, talking about the wedding and our jobs and our family and who to seat next to whom. At some point, we stumbled onto Bloomingdale, and with the sun striking orange through the trees, it seemed an enchanted avenue.

There was a For Sale sign in front of a white bungalow that had a wide front porch and a cedar-shake roof. The street and the house were like nothing we’d ever seen before, but we looked at each other and we nodded. It was as if we knew. We called a real estate agent as soon as we got home. We closed on the house a month later, just in time for our wedding.

Nick turned into the alley and parked in the garage behind our house.

He took my hand, and I followed him through our tiny back garden, just starting to bloom with daffodils, and up the wooden back stairs into the house. Nick switched on lights as he led me through the kitchen with its wood-and-glass cupboards, original to the house, and down into the basement.

It was dark on the stairs. “Nick?” I said, almost faltering as I followed him halfway down.

“Okay, stay here.” His hand slipped from mine, and I was gripped with sudden fear.

Then light flooded the basement. I blinked. This was not our dank basement with boxes of discarded clothes and books and my painting table set up into one tiny corner. This was an entirely new room.

I hurried down the steps and ran my hands over the walls—once gray cement but now papered a pleasing sage-green. I stared at the floors, which were now covered with straw matting, on top of which sat an Oriental carpet in tones of orange and green. A bookshelf rested against the left wall, filled with my art books. The fluorescent strips no longer hung from the ceiling. Instead, a globe pendent provided a warm glow. Against the far wall was an old mahogany artists’ table with a slanted top. Two of the photo paintings I’d been working on had been clipped there.

“Nick?” I said.

“Do you like it?” He put a hand on the table and beamed at me. “It’s your painting room. It’s all yours.”

“You did this for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. I took a few days away from the office. I’ve been working like crazy.” He looked around the room with a grin. “I was thinking it needed some artwork, though. Let’s see that painting.”

I glanced down and realized I was still holding Roberto’s canvas in my left hand. “Oh, I don’t think…”

But Nick was already taking it from me and peeling off the paper. “It’s great. God, it looks like you. Who’s the artist?”

I froze. “Um…”

Nick held it against the wall, right over the mahogany table. “It’s perfect. What do you think?”

I watched my husband smiling broadly, holding the canvas painted by Roberto. Why had I been so quick to judge? Why had I assumed he was cheating again? Panic and dread surged up my throat and pushed a tear from my eye.

Nick’s grin started to falter. “Rach?”

“This is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.”

He looked relieved, happy. He placed the painting on the table and held open his arms.

I brushed away the tear and rushed into them.

6

One Sunday a few months after Rome, Nick and I were in my new basement room. The globe fixture infused the place with cozy light, while a beam of hot August sun pushed its way through the sole window into the cool. Nick lounged in the plush chenille chair we’d put in the corner, and he had the Sunday papers fanned out around him. He liked to read the business section of one, then the book section of another. He felt that Sundays were the one day he could be unorganized, capricious. I stood at my artists’ table, swiping a solvent on a black-and-white photo to prime it for painting. It was a shot of Lake Michigan, and the Chicago skyline beyond that, taken from Diversey Beach. I had already printed and painted this photo twice before, but the blues I mixed kept making the sky too cartoonlike, the teal of the lake too austere, the city too gray.