The Rome Affair
The Rome Affair
Laura Caldwell
It was an affair…to regret.Rachel Blakely's charmed life is significantly tarnished after her husband Nick's infidelity, but she wants to give her marriage a second chance. Then a business trip to sun-drenched Rome with her best girlfriend Kit leads to a night of passion with a stranger–a one-night stand meant to signify the end of a painful chapter in her life.Rachel returns home determined to put the past behind her, and at first life seems golden again. Nick is more loving than ever, and following his promotion to senior partner in a prestigious plastic surgery practice, the couple is welcomed into Chicago's high society, where beautiful people live beautiful lives.But there is a dark side…one that sends Rachel's life spiraling into a nightmare. It's clear everyone is guilty of something. But whose secrets will lead to murder?
Laura Caldwell
The Rome Affair
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Coming Next Month
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, my agent, Maureen Walters, and the crew at MIRA—Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Katherine Orr, Craig Swinwood, Sarah Rundle, Don Lucey, Steph Campbell, Margie Miller, Rebecca Soukis, Carolyn Flear, Kathy Lodge, Dave Carley, Gordy Giohl, Erica Mohr and Andi Richman.
Thanks to everyone who read the book—
Christi Caldwell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Kelly Harden, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Pam Carroll, Karen Uhlman, Joan Posch, Dustin O’Regan, Beth Kaveny, Jane Jacobi Mawicke, Ted McNabola and Kris Verdeck.
Thanks also to those who helped me with my tireless questions about murder prosecutions, including Detective Kevin Armbruster, criminal defense attorney Catharine O’Daniel, former prosecutor James Lydon and former police officer Giovanna Long.
Most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to Jason Billups.
Prologue
She sees lights. Lights in the sky—stars, she corrects herself—and lights from beautiful apartments with accomplished people inside. She is close to those people right now, very close, but she wonders if any of them will notice her dying.
She has never been the type to imagine her own death. In fact, she has felt immune to it, as if death was something that happened to other people. She always assumed there was time.
But there is precious little time left. It has been only an instant since it started, and she knows there are maybe one or two such moments left.
And strangely, there is relief.
1
I understand now that innocence is relative. I know that the night before I left for Rome, I felt jaded. After all we’d been through, I thought I’d aged somehow and lost my sparkle. I only wish I’d grasped then that the fall from innocence was a very long one.
“Why do you want to go to Italy with Kit?”
Nick sat on the bed and watched through the bathroom doorway as I went about my nighttime ministrations—cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream. Why I used all this crap, I wasn’t sure.
“I have a pitch at that architectural firm, and you can’t go because of work,” I answered. I leaned toward the mirror and dabbed cream around my left eye.
“You’ve hardly seen Kit in years,” Nick said.
“You don’t have to see a friend to be a friend.”
Although Kit had been a bridesmaid in our wedding four years ago, she’d moved to California shortly after to try her hand at acting. We didn’t talk every week, or even every month, but we never lost the bond best girlfriends have. After a few years of escalating credit-card debt and many failed auditions, Kit was back in Chicago, and I was more grateful than ever to have her near. At thirty-five, most of my friends were moms—what I thought I’d be, too—and they were no longer available for nights at wine bars, let alone trips to Rome.
“Why are you so worked up about this?” I asked Nick.
“I’m not, Rachel. I’m just curious.”
But my husband, Dr. Nick Blakely, was worked up. I could tell from the way he ran his fingers through his curly, close-clipped hair and rubbed at the spot between his eyes. He was also acting overly casual. His tie was loosened after a long day seeing patients, and he leaned back with one hand on the creamy ivory sheets of our bed, but there was a stiffness to the way he held himself.
“You have to be careful in Italy,” he continued. “Especially with the guys.”
“Is that right?” This came out sounding a bit like a taunt, and I let it hang in the air.
How strange that after all the therapy, after all the crying and the repiecing of our relationship, it was Nick who worried about me, as if retribution lay in wait around a corner somewhere.
“Nick, I’ve traveled to Rome before. I lived in Italy.”
“You were twelve when you lived there with your family, and it was for six months. And since then you’ve always traveled with me. Now it’s just you and Kit. I mean, I’m glad you’re going with someone, but you still have to be careful,” Nick said. “There are all sorts of guys who love to prey on American women.”
“I am quite sure I can handle the Italian men,” I said.
I took a second’s pleasure in the stricken look that flitted across his face, but even now, I hated to see him hurt.
“Nick,” I said, moving to the bed and sitting on his lap. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
On Saturday, Nick dropped Kit and me at O’Hare airport. The arrival gates were mobbed with cars and cabs, all with doors and trunks ajar. The May air was balmy, with sudden gusts of wind that sent stray papers floating into the air.
“Golden Girl,” Nick murmured, hugging me fiercely.
That nickname of mine had started with Kit. “Golden Child,” she used to call me when we were growing up. It was mostly based on my last name—Goldin—but it was also because I was an only child of relatively affluent parents, and I had, quite simply, enjoyed a very nice time of it. I knew that was true, even when I was young.
When I met Nick at an art-gallery party in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood, he immediately began calling me Golden Girl. Again there was my name, and Nick said he saw a gold light in my pale green eyes, too.
When we got married, despite changing my name to Blakely, I felt so lucky and so special I thought I would be the Golden Wife. I thought I’d have the Golden Life.
So far, it hadn’t turned out exactly like that.
I hugged Nick back, thinking that it was usually he who went away on business trips, leaving me at home, saying little prayers that the paper he had to present would go smoothly, that he was sleeping okay and not drinking too much or eating too poorly. But I was ready for some girls’ time with Kit. Now it was his turn.
Nick finally let me go but held one of my hands in his. He looked at Kit. “Have a nice time,” he said formally.
Nearly everyone talked to Kit that way since she’d returned from L.A. No one knew what to do with her, I suppose. She hadn’t quite found a career, she didn’t have a boyfriend or husband. She’d been a struggling actress in L.A., a hard-luck existence most of us in Chicago had little in common with. And yet Kit also had a sparkly kind of mystery about her. Even now, she wore rose-colored mirrored sunglasses and a taupe chiffon scarf around her neck, her rusty red hair tousled artfully. If she took off the glasses, you could see that her blue eyes were almost purple, depending on what she was wearing, and those eyes had a sly, knowing way about them. She looked like an intriguing woman, a Hollywood starlet on the lam. As one of her closest friends, though, I knew she was hurting from her failures out West.
“Thanks, Nick.” She smiled at him.
I breathed a sigh of gratitude for that grin. Those who knew about our marital problems were furious at Nick. They either refused to talk to him, or they made snide remarks when they did. I knew he was getting sick of being the whipping boy, and I didn’t like it, either. Although I could taunt him and stalk away all I wanted, I didn’t want anyone else treating him badly.
“Meet you at the ticket counter?” I said to Kit.
She readjusted the scarf around her neck. “Sure thing.”
I turned to him when she’d left. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“Work. Miss you like crazy.”
I smiled. “Get some sleep, huh?”
Nick and I spent our evenings together again, but after I’d gone to bed, he would work late into the night on a new paper, hoping it would bring him a partnership. He’d gone into plastic surgery not for the glamour surgeries and the money they brought, but for the real treatments that could help people. But now that he was at the best plastic surgery office in the city, he had to perform those glam surgeries, and he had to publish to get promoted to partner.
“I doubt I’ll get much sleep,” Nick said. “I’ve got to take a couple of board members to dinner, too.”
“When do they decide?”
He rolled his eyes. “A month or so.”
Despite his feigned nonchalance, Nick was anxious about making it on The Chicago General Auxiliary Board—what everyone in the city called The board. It was a group of handpicked young and influential people who threw parties, ostensibly to raise funds for Chicago General Hospital, where Nick was on staff, but really to identify themselves as the crème de la crème of Chicago society. Nick wanted to get on the board not only to improve his chances of becoming partner, but also because he’d always been a member of the in-crowd growing up in Philadelphia. His father was a longstanding politician, and although the Blakelys had never been wealthy, they were exceptionally well connected and admired. They were invited to every soiree and function in town. When Nick took off for med school, and eventually his residency in Chicago, he said he was leaving Philly so that he wouldn’t ride his family’s coattails. But the limelight was a place where Nick was accustomed to being. He missed it. And although I could be just as happy in our basement painting my black-and-white photos as I could be at a grand charity ball, I supported Nick. I’d known our social life would be a busy one.
Nick kissed me on the forehead. “Good luck with your sales pitch, hon.”
I closed my eyes, leaned into him and inhaled the warm scent he always carried, as if he’d just come in from the sun. “Thanks. And really, Nick, make sure you sleep enough.”
“You know I only sleep with you.”
We both froze for a second. It was the kind of remark that was supposed to be light, but was now only a reference to what used to be true.
“Seriously,” Nick said, rushing in to fill the silence, to fix it. “I meant I’ll be up all night because I won’t know what to do without you.”
I took a step back and looked away. To my right, a dad struggled to extract a stroller from the trunk of his car. That was the kind of problem I thought Nick and I would be having at this point—how to fit the stroller in the car, where to put the crib, what color to paint the nursery.
“Rachel,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.”
I knew he was sick of apologizing, and the truth was, I was getting sick of hearing it.
“C’mere,” he said, pulling me to him again.
He kissed me, and despite myself, I responded. Before, we had been like everyone else. Now, we were passionate people, fighting for our relationship, and Nick was a man who couldn’t get enough of me.
“Be careful, okay?” he said, holding my face in his hands.
“Nick, I’m not gone that long.”
“Tell me you’ll be careful.”
“Of course I will be. I’ll strap my purse around me tight. I’ll watch out for gypsies.”
He studied my face. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered.
“I love you,” I said in response, because that was true, and it might not have been true to say I’d miss him.
2
It’s been said that Rome lacks the languid, friendly allure of other Italian cities, but the Roman mornings, at least to me, are undeniably charming. The colors stun the mind—the thousand shades of gold that are impossible to capture on film or in memory. Even when I’ve taken black-and-white photos of the city and painted on them, I can’t adequately capture a Roman morning—the way the sun gives a misty yellow glow to every corner of the city.
It was that pale yellow blush that struck me as we stepped out of our cab, just around the corner from the Piazza di Spagna.
“Wow,” Kit murmured for at least the tenth time since we’d landed. She embraced me as the cabbie lugged our bags from the trunk. “You are amazing for bringing me here.”
I had used most of my air miles to upgrade us both, and I had paid a few hundred dollars of Kit’s ticket, as well. Since moving back from L.A., Kit was short on cash. Not that this was anything new. I’d known Kit since first grade, and ever since her father died a few years after that, money had been tight. I used to pay her way into the movies and buy her bracelets at Claire’s Boutique so she could be like the rest of the girls. Money was even scarcer now. Kit told people she worked “in the marketing department of the Goodman Theatre,” which was true and sounded respectable enough, but the plainer truth was she was the department secretary. She collated, she stapled, she answered phones. She made very little money. What she had usually went toward the bills surrounding her mom’s cancer treatment.
“I’m glad to do it,” I told Kit, squeezing her hand. I was filled with a giddy feeling of promise, of a friendship renewed and, with the exception of my sales pitch tomorrow, a few days away from reality.
Kit and I checked into Il Palazzetto, a restored palazzo near the Spagna subway station. My mother had been to Rome the previous summer with her new husband, a real-estate mogul much older than she, and they’d stayed for two months at Il Palazzetto. She insisted Kit and I would be crazy to book anyplace else. When we stepped into the small foyer, I could see why.
The floor was a mosaic of colored stone. Sunlight flooded down the spiral marble staircase with its twisted, wrought-iron railings. On the second floor, our room had soaring ceilings, Roman columns and walls draped with gauzy, flowing fabric.
I opened the French window of our room, just in time to catch the sight of the pristine, white sun hitting the Spanish Steps.
I smiled over my shoulder at Kit.
“This is going to be good,” she said. Her voice told me she was excited in a way she hadn’t been in a long time. “This is going to be really good.”
I turned back toward the Roman morning and nodded.
Nearly everyone loves Italy. An adult who says, “Oh, I adore Italy” is like a child who says “I love Disneyland.” Of course you do.
The funny thing is that Italophiles believe it is they who have discovered Italy. They feel this love of all things Italian—the food, the ocher sunsets, the wine, the slow-moving life—which begins when they set foot on the dusty streets of Rome and ends when they head home. Every Italophile senses it is he who loves Italy more than the next, who understands her more deeply than the rest.
Kit and I were no exception. We had only three days to spend in Rome, so instead of sleeping the day away, we pushed past our jet lag and out into the city for a walk and some coffee.
We found a neighborhood bar in Piazza Navona, a long, U-shaped square with a tall obelisk and a Bernini sculpture and fountain in the middle. The piazza used to host chariot races, but now held cafés and strolling pedestrians.
“God, I needed this,” Kit said as we took our seat in front of the bar, our cappuccinos and a basket of rolls in front of us. She flipped back the napkin and offered the basket to me. I took a crescent roll, and she did the same.
“Me, too,” I said. “How’s your mom?”
She shrugged, her taupe chiffon scarf lifting around her face. “She’s doing everything she’s supposed to, but she knows the chemo is killing her at the same time it’s supposed to be curing her.”
“That’s horrible.” I thought how lucky I was to have two healthy parents. Healthy, divorced, never-speak-to-each-other parents, but who could knock it? “I’m sorry,” I said. Ineffective words.
“We’ll be all right.” Kit shook her hair away from her face. That wavy russet hair was one of the things that drew people to Kit. Not just men, who were staring at her even now as they passed us on their way to work, but the women, too. Her hair was glamorous, fiery—two traits most women wanted a little more of.
“God, look at her, will you?” Kit nodded toward a gaunt, striking Italian woman who was crossing the piazza. She wore a short black skirt and a pink shawl. Her black hair was swept up in a knot atop her head, and she clicked past us smartly in four-inch herringbone stilettos, despite the treacherous cobblestones.
“What do you think?” Kit said. “She’s in advertising, right? Or maybe fashion?”
“She could be a secretary. Even the civil servants here are dressed to kill.”
“Right, but her husband has money. She’s definitely married.”
We both peered at the woman’s left hand, and sure enough, there was a diamond ring that looked large even from a distance. “You got it,” I said.
This was a game Kit liked to play—guessing at people’s lives, then inserting herself mentally into those lives as far as she could. It was what had led her to acting.
Kit turned back to me. “Speaking of being married,” she said, “how’s Nick?”
“Fine. I think.”
“You think?” Kit’s eyes narrowed in concern.
After Nick’s affair last year, which took place over the span of a weeklong medical seminar in Napa, he had confessed months later. It was a Tuesday night, and I was slicing a tomato for salad. The time was 8:07 p.m. I remember this, because I held the knife in one hand and the large tomato in the other. The tomato’s juice was seeping like blood, and it suddenly seemed obscene, morbid. I checked the microwave clock, wondering if I had a few minutes before Nick came home to make something else, something more benign like spinach salad.
I hadn’t heard the door open, but I heard the creak of a floorboard in our house on Bloomingdale Avenue. Nick stepped into our kitchen and began crying so hard, his immaculate doctor’s hands cradling his face, that I thought someone had died. He had no idea why he’d done it, he said. He could only say that he wanted—needed—something new. He had felt it like a constant, terrible itch. But now the only thing new was how much he hated himself. I stood silently through his confession. When I found my voice, I begged him to tell me it was only one night. I might be able to deal with only one night. Nick shook his head and cried some more.
I made him move out for three months. I walked around stripped bare, so that the most mundane things inspired tears. During that time, I realized that infidelity is about much more than the physicality of the act. Of course, the physical can’t be ignored. The raw images of Nick with some other woman—their mouths clinging, bodies locked—hounded me, even made me do the clichéd run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Despite my mental gymnastics to avoid such thoughts, I always imagined the woman as gorgeous, maybe with gleaming, honey-colored hair and a strong, tanned body. This helped, strangely, because it gave some reason to what Nick had done. He had been lured in by someone stunning—someone tall and blond and entirely different from me, with my small frame and dark hair.
She wasn’t anything special, Nick told me at least a hundred times, just someone he met at a Napa restaurant. He knew it was his fault, not hers, but he still hated her now that it was done. He hated Napa. He hated the restaurant where he’d met her.
It was at this point in these discussions I always held up my hand. “Stop. Please,” I’d say. Although I had an image of her in my mind, I didn’t really want to know about this woman. I didn’t want to hear about the restaurant where she waitressed or maybe that she was supporting a child or that her sister had died the previous year. I didn’t want anything to overly personalize her.
I stayed with him because, unlike Nick, I did not want something new. I wanted him, and us, and a family, and everything I’d invested in. Before he’d told me, we’d been ready to get pregnant. But instead of a baby, Nick’s infidelity got us a therapist, Robert Conan, whom we’d seen twice a week until recently.
Conan told me that the glorification of this woman as an Amazonian goddess was “certainly not healthy,” but it was the only way I could cope. I chose to view the woman as an otherworldly, goddess-type creature who’d floated into Nick’s path one day, led him astray for five nights, and then left our world, hopefully for the very hot hallways of hell.
Nick and I were officially back together, but I still had a hard time.
“One minute it’s like we’re back to normal,” I told Kit, “then the next he’ll say something or I’ll say something and we’ll remember.”
“And then?”
I took a bite of croissant. It was flaky and buttery but suddenly hard to swallow. “And then it’s awful.”
Sometimes I was in love with Nick, proud of how we’d weathered the storm that had swept through our lives. Sometimes—when I picked up a wine from Napa Valley or saw a TV show about infidelity—my insecurity raged. Sometimes I hated him.
“God, now I’m sorry,” Kit said. “What a sad pair we are.” She put her cup down and threw an arm around my shoulders, hugging me across the table.
I hugged her back. Throughout high school, college and my early years in Chicago, my life had been refracted through the lens of my girlfriends’ eyes, particularly Kit’s. When I got married and she’d moved, I thought I didn’t need the insights or affirmations as often. But now, to be in the company of a friend gave me an optimistic charge. A good bout of girlfriend bonding was exactly what I needed.
Over Kit’s shoulder, I saw the sun moving across the piazza and beginning to warm the gray stone man in the center of the sculpture. Water splashed from the fountain, cleansing him.
Sitting back, I raised my cup. “Let’s have a toast. To Italy, and to a wonderful few days of escape.”
“To fabulous fucking friends!” Kit said. She let out a little holler, which drew looks from the people in the bar, and we touched our cups together.
Kit and I spent a languid first day, moving from one overpriced store on the Corso to the next, laughingly enduring the saleswomen who glanced pityingly at our American fashions and wondered out loud (they didn’t know I understood) whether we could afford the skirts we were looking at.
We were giddy and goofy from lack of sleep, and this was Italy. Nothing bad could touch us. We had dinner on the Via Veneto, doted on by the rotund proprietress who was different in every way from the saleswomen we’d encountered.
“Eat! Eat!” she kept saying. “You are nothing but bones.”
Food kept appearing at our table like wrapped presents under the tree—saffron risotto with gold leaves, pink salmon drizzled green with dill sauce. So, too, the men appeared. “Married,” I kept murmuring, holding aloft my left hand, reveling in the attention but somehow proud again of my marital status, while Kit grinned and flirted and sent them away, even as they sent us sparkling decanters of chianti. We tripped home arm in arm, laughing with memories already made.
But the next morning I was walloped by a bout of jet lag that made the previous day’s tiredness seem like child’s play. I couldn’t believe I had to attend a meeting, much less make a lengthy pitch on complicated architectural software.
I showered, but it failed to wake me up. I left Kit in her sumptuous bed, with plans to see her after my meeting. I headed for a neighborhood bar, where I downed two espressos, neither of which had any effect other than to make me blink more often and feel more dazed.
A twenty-minute cab ride took me over the muddy Tiber River and through Trastevere, onto a tiny, winding, cobblestone street with stone palazzi on either side. The driver stopped and pointed at an iron gate with the number thirteen etched in the stucco. When I got out of the car, I saw a small brass plaque announcing Rolan & Cavalli, the largest architectural firm in Italy. A twinge of anticipation fluttered in my belly.
I had fallen into a sales career five years out of college, after I decided I had to get the hell out of advertising, an industry I’d misguidedly battled my way into. I thought I’d use sales as a sort of break, that I’d probably return to advertising (for no one truly left, one of my bosses had once said) and find a job at a better agency, or at least one that didn’t want me to specialize in the tedium that was account management. But I loved sales—the rush, the wondering, the cliff-like highs and even the lows.
The lows had been few until recently, when the economy slowed and construction slowed along with it, leaving many architects wondering if they really needed our pricey new software to help them design buildings. The U.S. offices of Rolan & Cavalli had finally come around and begun using the software after almost a year of my working on them. Now, I was here to convince the Roman architects that their Italian office needed the software as much as their American counterparts. Laurence Connelly, my boss in Chicago, was counting on me to land this account. “You’ll bowl over those Italians, Blakely,” he’d said in a rare attempt at encouragement. “Go get ’em.”
The gate buzzed, and I walked into a large courtyard with a white cherub fountain in the middle, a few cars and scooters parked to one side. On the opposite side of the courtyard, double doors made from heavy pine swung open and a portly man in his early fifties stepped outside, extending his hand.
“You are Rachel Blakely?” he said in formal, heavily accented English.
“Yes, hello.” I quickly crossed the courtyard and shook his hand.
“I am Bruno Cavalli. Benvenuto. Welcome to Roma.”
“Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.” I pumped his hand once more, surprised that the owner himself had greeted me.
I felt the exhilaration of an impending pitch, a potential sale. Sometimes being in sales was painful—particularly when you were faking your way through a cold call or getting shot down from a company you’d been working with for five years—but the anticipation and bursts of elation from my job had gotten me through Nick’s revelation about his affair. It had given me back some of the confidence he’d stolen. And here in Rome was potential. Here, I might close again.
Bruno showed me through the front doors and through a sitting room decorated in shades of sienna and white. We made small talk as we walked, passing offices and drawing tables. By the time we reached the conference room, a round space with a large, mahogany table in the center, I was feeling charged up and ready to sell Bruno and his team—four men and two women—on the excellence of our software.
Bruno introduced me to the team, and I thanked him in Italian, then switched to English. “Thank you all for having me and for your time today.”
One of the team members, a paunchy man in an olive green suit, turned his head and leaned an ear toward me. A few others nodded, but as I moved from a few introductory remarks into my pitch, I saw perplexed glances. I slowed my words, but I quickly realized that although Bruno had near-perfect English, his staff did not. Some knew a few words, but when it came to talking architecture, they were only used to Italian. As the confused looks around the table increased, my adrenaline faded.
Finally I halted my words. “Capite?” I said. Do you understand?
The man in the olive suit shook his head. A woman held up her hand and rocked it from side to side. “Cosi, cosi.”
I glanced at Bruno, who shrugged. “Italiano?” he said.
I struggled not to rub a distressed hand over my tired face. While it was true that I’d lived here for six months as a kid and studied Italian in college, and while it was also true that I could order wine with the best of them and eavesdrop on snotty saleswomen, I didn’t think I could give an entire pitch in Italian, certainly not to describe complex architectural concepts. My company, Randall Design, had sent me, knowing I was the only one in our sales team with any Italian skills, but I’d been given the impression that I would mostly rely on English, stepping in here and there with a few Italian phrases.
Still, I would give it my best shot. I launched into my pitch in my schoolgirl Italian. The first few sentences came out okay. Then I started to stumble. I had to halt frequently to think of the proper words, the proper tenses, how to form a sentence. Pitying glances came from around the table.
I shuffled along until I heard “Scusi!” in a high, cultured voice.
The speaker was a woman with white hair pulled back in a low knot. She had raised a delicate hand. A braided gold bracelet adorned her slender wrist.
“Si?” I said eagerly. Questions during a pitch gave me motivation; they revealed that the client might be interested.
But the white-haired woman rattled off a lengthy question at such a rapid speed I only picked up every fifth word or so.
I took a breath and tried to respond to what I thought she might be asking—a question about our 3D capability. I mangled a few words; I forgot others. A man to my right wore a look of complete confusion and leaned closer, as if I onlyneeded to talk more loudly. The woman with the white hair shook her head dismissively.
Bruno offered to translate, and the question-and-answer session, which should have taken ten minutes, took about forty. My pitch limped.
After two hours, Bruno stood from his chair. “Grazie, Rachel,” he said, looking at his watch. “If we might take a break.”
I nearly kissed him with gratitude.
But then he continued, “Two of our members will take you for a meal. We will finish this afternoon.” He spoke in Italian to the team members, all of whom nodded.
“Oh…” I said. I thought of Kit at the hotel, waiting for me. I’d promised we’d have the afternoon together, that I’d show her some of my favorite Rome sites, aside from the Gucci store. I thought of how badly I wanted a shower and a glass of wine and a nice long chat with my girlfriend.
But Bruno was giving me another chance, one I needed and appreciated.
“Thank you so much. That would be lovely,” I said. “Could I please use your phone?”
I called Kit from Bruno’s office and apologized. She was silent for a moment. “It’s okay, Rachel,” she said then. “I’ll just go wander. Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.”
My hatchet job of the language continued its shamble at the ristorante, where they took me to lunch. There was no reprieve, only more questions about the software—questions that took me decades to decipher and centuries to answer. This sorry situation continued during my afternoon presentation of the product itself. I noticed every sigh from the team members who couldn’t understand me. I saw them glancing at their watches.
When the meeting ended—finally—I buttoned my jacket and shook Bruno’s hand. They’d consider the software and let me know, he said. Yet when I met his eyes, I could see the decision was already made, and the answer was no.
I walked through the office, tapped of all strength, mental, physical or otherwise. How wonderful it had sounded back at the office—oh, I’m going to Rome for a meeting! But the reality had been as fun as the middle seat on an overnight flight.
3
Slumped in the back of the cab, I began to think of how I’d tell my boss, Laurence, the news. He wouldn’t be pleased.
I paid the cabdriver and tried to cheer myself up by thinking about a night out with Kit. Professional disaster or no, there were bottles of wine around the city, just waiting for us to open them.
But when I got back to the room, there was a note.
Rach,
Met the most amazing guy! He works for the French embassy. He’s taking me to some place called Ketumbar. I figured you’d be exhausted and would want to sleep. See you later tonight. (Maybe!)
Kit
P.S. I hope your pitch went great. I’m sure it did. Thanks again for bringing me to Rome. I’m in love with this city!
I tried not to be disappointed. I’d left her alone all day, after all, and she was right, I was exhausted.
I took off my clothes and slipped on the heavy, silk hotel robe. Then I made the dreaded phone call to Laurence and told him about the pitch. “The owner told me before I left that his team spoke English, but they couldn’t understand the whole pitch.”
“I thought you spoke Italian.”
“Not well enough to get through a whole pitch.”
Silence on the other end.
“This is not good timing, Blakely,” he said, his voice as prim and severe as a schoolmarm’s. “We lost the Ricewell account today.”
“What?” Ricewell was a huge architectural firm, and one of our biggest clients. Their purchases of our software, and its yearly updates, accounted for a large portion of our profits. “What happened?”
“I can’t go into it now. Randall wants to talk to me.” Terry Randall was the company’s not-so-pleasant owner. He made Laurence seem like an easygoing beach bum. “You’re sure Cavalli isn’t going to buy?” Laurence asked.
The afternoon flashed before me—the disdainful glances from the white-haired woman, sympathetic ones from Bruno. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Jesus, Blakely, I didn’t need this. I’ll see you when you get back. And have a great time over there.” His voice was thick with sarcasm. “I’m glad somebody’s getting a vacation.” He hung up.
I lay back on the bed and dialed Nick’s work number. It was late morning in Chicago, and it was his day to see patients at the office, but I wanted to hear his voice.
Tina, the receptionist, answered. “Hi, Rachel!” she said cheerily. “How’s Rome?”
I turned my head on the pillow and looked around the room. The windows were open, the breeze making the curtains sway and billow. “Beautiful. Thanks for asking. Hey, is Nick busy?”
“He’s not in today.”
“What do you mean?”
“He took today off. It’s super warm here, like almost eighty degrees. He said something about golf.”
“Oh, all right.”
But Nick didn’t golf anymore, at least not unless he had to. He had played on his high school team in Philadelphia, an intense experience that diminished his love for the game, and so now he played with the other doctors at his office only when he felt forced to do so for appearance’ sake.
“Did anyone else take the day off?” I asked hopefully. “Like Dr. Adler or Dr. Simons?”
“Nope,” Tina said, cheerful as ever.
I got off the phone and dialed our home number, trying to hold my flaring suspicions at bay. Maybe he was just using golf as an excuse, and he was home working on his paper. Maybe he was coming down with a cold. My own voice on the machine answered after four rings, politely asking callers to leave their name and number. I hung up and dialed Nick’s cell phone. It went right to voice mail, as if turned off by someone who very much did not want to be reached.
Something as heavy as lead crept into my chest.
I got up from the bed and went to the French windows. I pushed them farther open, hoping the sight of the Spanish Steps would lift my spirits, but the orange glow of the sun setting somewhere over the city only made me melancholy for company, for my husband, or at least the husband I used to have. The white marble steps seemed covered with couples taking in the coming twilight. As far as my eye could see, people were holding hands, speaking softly into each other’s ears.
Where was he? Why take off work on a Monday, only two days after I’d left? Why hadn’t he mentioned it?
I thought about all the talks we’d had after his affair. Why, why, why? I’d asked over and over. Whydid you do it? Nick shook his head, his eyes anguished and disbelieving, as if he couldn’t quite accept what he’d done. He said it was a product of his boredom, his worries about whether he’d make partner at the office, whether he’d make it onto the board. He needed something new and exciting to distract him, and when she walked into his life in Napa, he felt she would bring him that excitement, if only momentarily. He swore there was nothing wrong with our relationship. He wasn’t bored with me, he kept saying. He wasn’t harboring any kind of resentment toward me.
In some ways, I was relieved by his answers, or lack of them. Because I didn’t want anything to be inherently wrong with us. I wanted Napa to be a colossal, bumbling, impulsive mistake.
But I’d never stopped to think that maybe he couldn’t control such impulses. I didn’t even ask if he wanted to.
I shut the windows and yanked off my robe. I started the shower, turned the heat high and stepped inside, letting the water pound my skin.
He’s at it again. That was all I could think. It wasn’t the goddess from Napa this time, but someone else. Unbelievable. How smug I’d been this week, thinking how much he’d miss me. How sure I’d been of his devotion when I turned my back to him at the airport.
Nick’s career couldn’t handle a divorce right now. Hadn’t he told me that in so many words while we were seeing the therapist? We’d sat side by side on the maroon leather couch in Conan’s office, while Conan himself, a large man with a trim gray beard, sat on a wide leather recliner.
How had Nick put it? “Rach, listen, I know this is unfair, but I have to ask you something. It’s…” His words drifted off, and he gave me a guilty glance.
“Go ahead, Nick,” Conan prompted. “Everyone is entitled to a request here.”
Nick nodded. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell so many people about our…our troubles.”
It was our second visit when Nick said this, and I looked at him with disgust. “You slept with another woman. Over and over for a week.” I saw Conan studying me as my voice drove up in volume, so I took a breath and lowered it. “And now you want me to be quiet?”
“I am so sorry, Rachel,” Nick said. He reached out and touched my leg. “Like I said, I realize this isn’t fair. But you know how they are at the office.” In short, the partners at his medical practice looked favorably not only upon exceptional surgical skills and the publishing of papers, but also on charitable work and a clean, traditional private life.
I had assumed Nick wanted our marriage to work because he loved me, because he made that colossal, impulsive mistake, but now I began to wonder if he’d just been patching things up until he was a partner and a member of the board, when he could do anything he wanted with his life.
In the shower, a few frustrated tears slipped from my eyes, but after a minute, I began to hate my own confusion and self-pity.
I got out of the shower and called Nick’s cell phone three more times in quick succession. I started to despise the sound of his cheerful yet soothing physician’s voice—You’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Nick Blakely. Please leave me a message. If this is a medical emergency…
I called the concierge and asked her to make a reservation at a good restaurant within walking distance. I dried my hair, recklessly directing the hair dryer any which way, never lifting the brush from the counter, so that the natural, erratic waves took over my dark hair. I put on black pants and high-heeled satin sandals. No more feeling sorry for myself. I had no idea what Nick was doing, but I was in Rome, and I was going out for the night.
As I walked to the restaurant, I filled up with the feeling I always got when I was in Rome—satiated though I hadn’t yet eaten, overwhelmed by antiquity even though I hadn’t yet waited in line to see anything. Beauty and history surround you in Rome. They’re inescapable, and their presence buoyed me, if only for a few moments.
The last time I’d been in Rome, Nick and I had strolled hand in hand over cobblestone streets, me gripping his arm when we crossed particularly choppy spots, and we stopped at nearly every os-teria for a glass of wine.
I pushed the thoughts of Nick from my mind as I spied Dal Bolognese, the restaurant where the concierge had booked me. It was tucked next to one of Piazza del Popolo’s twin churches. The place had white tablecloths and umbrellas out front. Soft light and classical music spilled from the white-curtained windows.
I stepped inside and looked around, my eyes immediately landing on a man talking to the maître d’. He wore tan linen slacks and a long-sleeved maroon shirt. His hair was dark brown, his skin tanned, and faint lines ran from his eyes to his full mouth. He had one hand on the maître d’s shoulder.
For some reason, the man turned to me as if expecting me. His expression when his eyes met mine said, Ah, there you are.
For a moment I forgot where I was. I don’t know how long I met his gaze. Surely it was too long, for the maître d’stepped around him, and said, “Madame?”
I stayed mute, still looking at this man, who felt brand-new and at the same time intensely familiar. One side of his maroon shirt collar had fallen aside, and I was drawn to the sight of his tanned skin below his collarbone.
“Madame?” the maître d’ said again.
I dragged my eyes away, but I could still feel him staring at me.
“Prenotazione per uno,” I managed to say. “Blakely.” I felt relieved to have spoken in coherent Italian, even if it was just a few words.
“Si, si,” the maître d’ said, glancing down at the reservation book. “Your table, here.” He gestured toward an umbrellaed table in front of the restaurant. “Please.”
I took a step to follow, but I couldn’t help stopping and turning. The man in the linen shirt was still standing there. He was still watching me.
“Your table,” I heard the maître d’say behind me.
“I should go,” I said to the man. Stupidly, I realized. He was a few feet away from me, and why was I talking to him at all? He hadn’t even spoken.
Feeling foolish, I turned again, followed the maître’ d and gratefully took my seat, hiding my face with a tall, leather wine menu.
I ordered buffalo mozzarella and asparagus to start, then porcini risotto. While I waited for my food, I sipped from a glass of crisp white wine. But I hardly noticed the tart apple flavor as I glanced around the restaurant. Where had he gone? But then, what did it matter? I quickly finished the glass and ordered another.
I ate my mozzarella when it came. The cheese was so fresh, it must have been made that day. Yet I had to struggle to appreciate it, more focused on the fact that the restaurant was full to capacity, and everyone was having a delightful time. With their friends. With their spouses.
I ordered another glass of wine with my risotto, a creamy concoction that somehow turned my stomach. I pushed the rice around on my plate, imagining Nick in the bed of some woman. Then a thought struck me. He might have her—whoever the hell she was—in our bed. I was glad I wasn’t in Chicago then. I could easily become one of those people who chased their straying spouse with a semiautomatic.
The waiter had just handed me my bill when the man I’d seen earlier appeared at my side.
“Ciao,” he said. His voice was low, smooth.
“Ciao,” I answered.
“I will call you then.”
I blinked a few times. “Pardon me?”
“I would like to call you.”
“Look, you don’t know me…”
He smiled. It was a kind smile, one that bore the experience of many years. I thought he must be in his mid-forties. How is it that Italians wear their age so well?
“You are alone in the city?” he said.
“No, no. I’m with a friend.” I realized the ridiculousness of this statement.
“Please,” he said simply. The collar of his shirt, which I could tell up close was made from a soft, and probably very expensive linen, had fallen aside again. He made a gesture to right it. His tanned hands were long and elegant and dotted with splatters of paint. Artist’s hands.
“You don’t know where I’m staying,” I said somewhat coquettishly. I felt a xpleasing blaze in my stomach at my boldness.
“Yes,” the man said. “True.” There were flecks of green in his smiling brown eyes. “Where shall I call you?”
I shook my head and forced out a little laugh. I knew Italian men loved to seduce American women, the thought being that they were—sexually speaking—much easier when on the road, particularly in Europe. I wasn’t one of those women, although clearly this man thought I was.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t do this.” I put some euros on my bill. Feeling silly, I stood. “Excuse me, I have to go.”
The man bowed slightly, then stepped aside. “Of course.”
I moved around him and without looking back, I headed out into the warm Rome night.
When I pushed open the door to our room, I saw that Kit was still gone. I checked for messages. There were none, not from my husband or Kit.
I called Nick’s phone. That grating message again. I called home. No answer.
I slipped between the cool white sheets, and waited for sleep to envelop me. I dozed, my mind working through short bursts of dreams, all of them unintelligible but filled with the color of Rome’s gold. I awoke and kept thinking about the man, although I knew this was illogical. I turned over in bed.
Just as I did, the phone rang—an unfamiliar bleat that reminded me I was far from home. I sat up and stared at the phone. I looked over at Kit’s empty bed, then lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” I said. “Pronto?”
“Giorno.” It wasn’t Nick. It wasn’t Kit. It was him. I just knew. “Giorno,” he said again when I didn’t respond.
“Is it morning?” I said.
“Soon.”
A pause.
“How did you get my number?” I asked.
“My friend who works at the ristorante. He told me where you were staying.”
“Oh.” More than anything, I was surprised at how flattered I felt that he’d searched me out.
“Please do not be angry. It is hard to explain, but I feel I have to see you, to know you.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You will meet me?”
I thought of Nick. Of course I did. And the image of him, which should have stopped me—his round brown eyes, his curly, light brown hair, the constellation of freckles over his cheeks—instead incensed me.
I threw back the sheets and said, “Yes.”
4
“Ciao,” I called to the sleepy guy at the bell desk, as if I always left my hotel by myself in the wee hours to meet a man who was not my husband.
I stepped out into the inky night. The kiosk across from the hotel, which sold water and pizza, was closed, the apartments surrounding the hotel dark. It was not nearly morning, as the man had said, and daylight seemed far away, as if I might never see the sun again. I liked that thought.
My body felt light, made of air. I moved down the street like a patch of fog. He had told me to meet him halfway up the Spanish Steps. As I took the first white marble stair, I halted. The Spanish Steps are hundreds of feet wide and sky-high, so what exactly did “halfway” mean? The first landing? The second? Ignoring the questions, ignoring common sense, I climbed.
My shoes went tap, tap, tap as I padded upward, and in my chest, behind my ribs, a drumbeat of anticipation began.
I glanced up for a moment and saw the moon—a small, yellow globe—and the dark sky behind it. The steps were nearly empty of their usual crowd, but somewhere on them, young Italian men were singing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few pairs of lovers. No single man in a linen shirt. My eyes climbed the huge stairway for him. Maybe he wouldn’t come? Relief. Disappointment.
At the second landing, I turned and stared down toward the fountain. A few stragglers were gathered around it. Maybe he was one of them? Had I walked right past him? But he’d said “halfway.” I remembered that for sure. Maybe “halfway” was some Italian lingo. The confusion nearly pulled me from my dreamlike state. I started to process what I was doing, or at least how I hadn’t a clue of what I was doing.
But when I turned back to look up the steps, he was there.
“Ciao,” he said.
“Ciao.”
He came to me and took one of my hands. I felt a flutter through my belly and my limbs. “I don’t know your name,” he said.
“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.
“Are you ready for that benefit coming up?” I asked Nick.
I loved afternoons like this, conversations like this. They made me forget what I’d done in Rome and how I’d never been able to confess.
Nick gave a rueful laugh. “The printers haven’t done the programs yet, and of course that’s my department.”
“Well, you’re on the board now,” I said in a teasing tone. “You’ll have to handle it.”
Nick had finally made it onto the board, but he was essentially a pledge in a grown-up fraternity. As low man on the totem pole and someone trying to make it as an official member, he’d been given much of the unglamorous work that went into planning the board’s benefits and charity balls.
“Why did you ever let me join?” he said.
I turned, a wet cotton ball in my hand, and smirked. We both knew he loved being on the board. He loved the kudos it brought him from the docs at his office and the new friends it brought into our lives. The limelight he’d grown up in was back—albeit a tiny, probationary light. The truth was we were both on trial for the board. As a result, we were busier than ever with dinners and cocktail parties and lavish benefits. It tired me more easily than it did Nick, who preferred to gripe grudgingly and enjoy every second. And ultimately, seeing him pleased made me more happy than anything else.
As I turned back toward the photo, my eyes landed on the wall, on Roberto’s painting, still hung where Nick had insisted, right above my table. My stomach swooped and sank, as it did every time I saw it.
I’d told Nick the painting was a souvenir. He took that to mean it was a symbol of a memorable Roman trip, and he wanted such a thing in the new room he’d created. But to me, it was mostly symbolic of a grave mistake. The fact that my husband had put it there tortured me.
Every once in a great while, though, when I was able to push past the guilt, the painting was a symbol of sex and confidence and desire, all of which I’d lacked for a while before Rome. But now Nick and I had those things again. The sex was passionate and the ghosts were gone. It was as if my night with Roberto had driven away the woman Nick slept with in Napa. I knew that such a thought was somehow sick and wrong—what kind of person needed a matching bout of infidelity to cancel out the other?—but the effect couldn’t be denied. I no longer thought of the woman as a goddess. I no longer felt insecure or bruised. I realized how much I loved this man, my husband, and because of that, we’d grown assured again in our relationship.
“Nick,” I said impulsively.
“Yeah, hon?”
“I want to take down this painting.”
“Your Rome painting?”
I nodded.
“It looks great in here. Why?”
I stared at its slashes of red and gazed at the girl, who seemed to be me, in the middle of it. My throat threatened to close. “I just don’t like it anymore. I don’t need it.”
When Kit and I had returned from Rome, I agonized over whether to tell Nick about Roberto. Nick hadn’t told me about his affair until a few months after Napa, but the point was he had eventually. He’d had enough respect for me, and for us, to come clean with his sins. In those weeks after Rome, I understood how impossibly difficult that must have been for him, and I cherished him all the more for it. But I found I couldn’t do the same. Not because I didn’t respect him as much, or our marriage. On the contrary, I adored him; I adored us, the way we were now, again. It was simply that we’d already been through too much. Another transgression would splinter us irrevocably.
It sounded like a cop-out to my own ears, yet in my gut I believed it to be true. And so I kept my mouth shut, and a little piece of my heart grew black from the secret, the lack of fresh air. But it was my fault, I reckoned, my cross, and I was bearing it willingly. I didn’t need the painting to remind me.
“What will we put there?” Nick asked.
“My photo paintings. I’ll be done with this one by the end of the week, and I know I’ll get it right this time.”
“Out with the old, in with the new?”
“Exactly.” If the painting was gone, maybe I could forget. Maybe I could forgive myself.
Nick stood from the chair, the newspapers crinkling. “Let me help you, then.”
Together, we leaned over the high table and each took a bottom corner of the canvas. Carefully, we lifted it higher, then together we pulled it away from the wall.
“There,” Nick said.
“Yeah.” I grinned. The wall looked clean now, ready for the future. I stowed the canvas in the closet.
Nick crossed the room and hugged me. I pressed myself into him, my arms around his back and felt myself stir. “Want to go upstairs?”
He groaned softly. “Absolutely.”
The phone rang. “Don’t answer it.” I ran my tongue up the side of his neck.
“Let me make sure it’s not the service.” Nick grabbed the phone off the arm of the big chair and looked at the display. “Kit,” he said.
I took his hand and began leading him up the stairs. “Definitely don’t answer it.”
I hadn’t spoken to Kit very often since we returned. She spent much of her time with her mom or on the phone with Alain. But the truth also was that Kit made me think of Rome, and I wanted to forget it. In the same way I’d wanted the painting out of sight, I was inadvertently avoiding Kit.
Nick and I climbed the basement stairs, passed through our living room which was overly warm with late-afternoon sun, and went up the stairs to our bedroom.
At the foot of the bed, we kissed hard, our hands clawing at our clothes.
The phone rang again. “Sorry,” Nick mumbled. He twisted away and glanced at the bedroom phone on the nightstand. “Kit again.”
I lightly bit his collarbone. “Ignore it.”
But a minute later, the phone rang again.
“You better get it,” Nick said, slightly panting, his shirt off, his pants halfway down.
I groaned but grabbed the phone and answered it, holding my discarded T-shirt over my breasts.
“Rachel?” Kit said.
“Yeah, hi. What’s up?”
She broke into sobs.
“Kit, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my mom,” she said, still crying. “It’s everything.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital.”
In the parking lot of Chicago General Hospital, the sun beat on new asphalt, making my shoes stick as I hurried from my car. Inside the doors, the arctic blast of air-conditioning made me shiver.
I wrapped my arms around myself, realizing I had no idea where I was supposed to go.
“Cancer center,” said the woman at the information desk, handing me a map of the hospital campus. Chicago General was a vast complex, only a block from Lake Michigan, and although my husband was on staff, I rarely had occasion to visit.
I headed back outside, into the stifling afternoon. Using the map, I tracked down the cancer center and the chemotherapy unit, where Kit’s mom, Leslie Kernaghan, was supposed to be. And there was Kit, standing outside a glass-walled room, small tears skimming her features.
She smiled bleakly when she saw me. Her face was splotchy and her eyes were pink and raw, making their purplish hue sharper. Her red hair was flattened on one side, as if she’d just been roused from sleep.
I hugged her, then brushed her tears away with my knuckles. “What’s going on?” I looked inside the glass wall and saw Mrs. Kernaghan, or at least a withered, gray version of her, sleeping on a hospital gurney, tubes in her nose, IVs in her arm.
Kit took a deep breath, which caught in her lungs. “She needs this procedure tomorrow. It’s a new radiation treatment combined with chemo. It’s experimental, but it’s her best chance to survive. The thing is, the insurance isn’t covering anything anymore.” Kit stopped and her shoulders shuddered. More tears streamed from her eyes. “But Alain told me he’d pay for it.”
“Oh, how sweet,” I said.
“He said he’d wire the money right away. We didn’t get it. Then he told me yesterday he was getting on a plane. He was going to come here for the procedure, and he was going to pay for it.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it sounded great,” Kit said bitterly.
I could guess the rest. Situations like this, where men disappointed on grand scales, were always happening to Kit. “He didn’t come.”
She shook her head. “He said he had an embassy function he couldn’t miss, and there were problems transferring money overseas. When my mom found out, she started panicking. You should have seen her, Rach. She couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were bulging.”
I put my arm around her.
“She’s stabilized now,” Kit continued. “I talked the doctor into doing the radiation tomorrow, but they’ll never let us do chemo without payment. It might be the only thing that can save her.”
Kit started to sob—quietly and desperately—with her hand against the glass wall, as if to touch her mom.
I tightened my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Honey, I’m sorry. Doesn’t the Chicago General Board have a fund to help cancer patients?”
Kit gave a curt shake of her head. “They helped us a year ago, when mom was having surgery, but they cut us off.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “There’s a cap on how much they’ll give one person, I guess. We don’t qualify anymore.” She turned to face me. “What am I going to do?”
“Could you get a second mortgage on her condo?”
“It’s an apartment. She rents.”
“I could get Nick to talk to the board. He’s a member now, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, he’s what they call an associate member. He hasn’t officially made it yet. But I’ll talk to him, and maybe the board can help you out again.”
“That’ll take too long. We need help now.”
“Then we’ll give you the money.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course. I should have thought of it sooner. How much is it?”
“Three grand.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“I know it’s a lot, but…” She looked at her mom again, and her face twisted in agony.
“It’s fine. I’ll talk to Nick, and I’ll come back—”
“No, don’t,” Kit said. “Please don’t tell Nick.”
“Why?”
“I’m embarrassed. And my mother is, too. She hates being a charity case. Please.”
I thought about our finances. We had joint checking and saving accounts, as well as joint investments. If I took money from any of those, Nick would notice. But I also had my own savings, started long before Nick and I were together.
Kit sank her face into her hands, her shoulders trembling. “I just don’t know how much more I can take.”
I kissed her on the head. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll get you the money. I’ll go talk to your mom now, and then I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning, okay?”
She raised her head and gave me a fierce hug. “You are a good friend.” She said it in a way that implied she hadn’t been so sure about that a moment before.
On Monday morning, I went to work at seven. With the office cool and still empty, I checked my e-mail, returned calls from Friday and made appointments to call on an architectural firm the next day. As other employees trickled in, I checked my watch, waiting for nine o’clock, when my bank would open its doors and I could get Kit the money she needed. Because I was getting the funds from a savings account, I couldn’t write a check.
At five minutes to nine, my boss, Laurence Connelly, stepped into my office. His suit coat was already off, and he wore his usual suspenders, a too-shiny pink tie and a smirk. “How’s it going, Blakely?”
“Just fine.” I tried a smile, but since I’d gotten back from Rome without the Rolan & Cavalli account, things had been icy between Laurence and me. Every time Laurence tossed it in my face, which was often, I was reminded not only of my failure at the meeting but how I’d failed my marriage, as well.
“How was your weekend?” I asked.
He ignored the pleasantry. “Are you seeing the Baxter Company soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Get them to up their service agreement. We need that cash. Got it?” I knew what he was saying behind the obvious words—salespeople who didn’t bring in that cash could be fired. He’d already let four people go this year.
I stood, signaling the end of the conversation. “I know that, Laurence. That’s why I’m going to see them.”
“And what about Thompson & Sons?”
“I’m calling on them today.” I tossed my purse over my shoulder and reached for my sunglasses at the edge of my desk.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bank.”
He crossed his arms. “You can do your banking at lunch.”
I thought of Kit’s mom, tubes extending from her arms, like a battered boat tethered to a dock. “It’s important personal business. I’ll be back soon.”
“This is the business you need to be concerned about.” He pointed to the floor with a stubby, manicured finger.
I moved toward the doorway, hoping he’d step back. “I made my numbers last month.” Translation: Back off, blowhard.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re doing too well this month.”
“And that’s why I’m seeing the Thompson people today and Baxter tomorrow.”
He wasn’t moving. I knew Kit was at Chicago General, pacing, waiting for me, while her mother waited, too.
I angled a shoulder and pushed past him, trying to ignore the heavy, musky cologne he apparently thought was sexy. “See you later, Laurence.”
Outside on Monroe Street, the August air lay like steam over the Loop. People rushed for the doors of buildings—and for the air-conditioning—the same way we all rushed for warm shelter in the winter. I got in a cab and directed the driver north to Lincoln Park Savings & Loan, the small community bank where I’d done my banking since college and where Nick and I had opened accounts after we got engaged. We no longer lived in the neighborhood, and it was rare that either of us actually had to visit the branch.
I stepped inside the chilly confines of the bank and waited in line for one of the three tellers who appeared unruffled by the fifteen or so people already waiting for their services.
Ten minutes later, I finally made it to a teller.
“How can I help you?” asked a young man wearing a white shirt and blue tie.
“I need a money order for three thousand made out to Katherine Kernaghan.”
I thought of Nick then. I should tell him—I should come clean about something—but this was merely aid for a friend who desperately needed it, with money that was truly mine, which I’d earned. And Kit had asked me not to mention it.
The rationalizations didn’t help much. It only reminded me of the other, larger, secret I’d kept from him.
Two minutes later, I was in another stuffy, airless cab, speeding toward Chicago General.
Kit had changed clothes from the day before, but she was standing in the same place, her hand on the glass window.
I stood next to her and looked inside. Her mom was being tended to by a thermometer-wielding nurse in pink scrubs.
“How’s she doing?” I said.
“Same.” Kit’s voice was devoid of emotion.
“Are you working this week?”
“Goodman gave me the week off.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah.” Neither of us moved. “Were you able to get the money?”
“Of course.” I handed her a white envelope with the money order inside. I felt like I was doing something illicit.
Kit took it and put it in her purse. “It’s unfair, isn’t it?” she said, still looking at her mom. The nurse had finished up, and signaled Kit that she could come in. Kit barely nodded in return.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s entirely unfair.”
“Some people get nothing in life. They never get a goddamned thing. And then other people get it all, no matter what they do.”
“Yeah,” I said, not exactly sure what she meant.
She turned to me. Her eyes were clear again, not red like last night. “Like you, Golden Child. Everything is perfect for you.”
I opened my mouth. I was about to remind her of Nick’s affair, of my own, of my parents’ divorce and my sliding status at work, of how I’d thought I’d be a mother by this time in my life but how my marital problems had derailed that plan. But the fact was, despite it all, I knew those were not the world’s worst problems. I knew how fortunate I was. So I just nodded.
“Yep,” Kit said, with bitterness in her tone. She turned back to the window. “Everything works out for you.”
I felt stung by her words, but I knew she was hurting and scared, so I said nothing. I went inside the glass door and said hello to her mother. And then I left. In the cab, heading toward the Loop, I realized that Kit hadn’t thanked me.
7
Oftentimes, when I think back about Kit, I try to put my finger on the exact minute it all began to crumble and slide. When an earthquake happens, there’s always a quiet rumble that starts the disastrous movement. Sometimes I think that rumble might have gone as far back as our childhood together. Other times I think maybe it was the moment at the hospital, outside her mother’s room. But no matter where it started or why, I can always pinpoint the moment I knew with certainty the slide had begun—the night of the Weatherbys’ dinner party.
We’d been told it was “a get-together with just a few board members,” and being a Monday night I’d envisioned pizza and beer. I should have known better. The members of the board always lived large.
“A toast to one more month of summer,” said Joanne Weatherby that night. “And to Nick and Rachel.” She raised a glittering champagne glass.
The dinner crowd of twelve responded with clinking glasses and inquiring smiles sent our way.
“Eat, eat,” Joanne said, taking her seat. She was a tiny, blond woman and had been the executive director of the board for twenty-five years. This impressed me as much as her gargantuan, two-story, candlelit Michigan Avenue apartment, her designer clothes and the fact that, from what I’d heard, neither Joanne nor her husband had ever held a job.
“If I could just say a word,” Nick said, standing and holding up his glass. “Rachel and I are very glad to have met you all. We feel fortunate to call you friends.” He paused to take in the nods from the group, then raised his glass a little higher. “To the success of the board.”
The group raised their glasses once again. “To the board!”
When Nick had taken his seat once more—on one of the white, silk-covered chairs I was terrified of spilling on—and appetizer dishes of caviar had been served, all eyes fell on us. Again.
“So, Rachel, where do you two live in the city?” asked Valerie Renworth, a thin, raven-haired woman with round green eyes.
I should have anticipated such a question. After all, this was what it had been like since Nick made the board—dinners and charity balls and lots and lots of questions for the new couple. It was as if Nick and I were getting our fifteen minutes of fame in a certain, tony Chicago crowd. But we both knew this was a trial. We hadn’t been truly accepted yet.
Unfortunately, I was in mid-bite when Valerie asked her question, and the saltiness of the caviar caught in my throat. I coughed it down, tried for a discreet sip from my water glass and answered as fast as I could. “Bloomingdale Avenue. Do you know it?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Well, not many people do know it,” I said, warming to my topic. “It’s this tiny street south of Armitage. It runs only for a few blocks alongside an old train line. We’ve got a little bungalow there.”
“It sounds charming.” Coming from someone else, this could have been a backhanded slight, but Valerie had an easy, open way about her, and I smiled in return. I suppose she was used to people liking her. She was married to Charles Renworth, a man I had yet to meet since he was often out of town on business, but whom everyone knew owned half the commercial real estate in the Midwest.
“It is charming,” I said, glancing at Nick. “My lovely husband built me an artist’s studio in our basement. It’s the perfect house now.”
“Except for the cab situation,” Nick said. “In terms of taxi availability, we might as well live in Gurnee.”
Everyone laughed. I shot a confused look at Nick. Like me, he rarely said anything bad about our adopted street. Bloomingdale was like a member of the family, whose faults would never be discussed in public.
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Laura Caldwell
It was an affair…to regret.Rachel Blakely's charmed life is significantly tarnished after her husband Nick's infidelity, but she wants to give her marriage a second chance. Then a business trip to sun-drenched Rome with her best girlfriend Kit leads to a night of passion with a stranger–a one-night stand meant to signify the end of a painful chapter in her life.Rachel returns home determined to put the past behind her, and at first life seems golden again. Nick is more loving than ever, and following his promotion to senior partner in a prestigious plastic surgery practice, the couple is welcomed into Chicago's high society, where beautiful people live beautiful lives.But there is a dark side…one that sends Rachel's life spiraling into a nightmare. It's clear everyone is guilty of something. But whose secrets will lead to murder?
Laura Caldwell
The Rome Affair
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Coming Next Month
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my editor, Margaret O’Neill Marbury, my agent, Maureen Walters, and the crew at MIRA—Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Katherine Orr, Craig Swinwood, Sarah Rundle, Don Lucey, Steph Campbell, Margie Miller, Rebecca Soukis, Carolyn Flear, Kathy Lodge, Dave Carley, Gordy Giohl, Erica Mohr and Andi Richman.
Thanks to everyone who read the book—
Christi Caldwell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Kelly Harden, Clare Toohey, Mary Jennings Dean, Pam Carroll, Karen Uhlman, Joan Posch, Dustin O’Regan, Beth Kaveny, Jane Jacobi Mawicke, Ted McNabola and Kris Verdeck.
Thanks also to those who helped me with my tireless questions about murder prosecutions, including Detective Kevin Armbruster, criminal defense attorney Catharine O’Daniel, former prosecutor James Lydon and former police officer Giovanna Long.
Most of all, thank you, thank you, thank you to Jason Billups.
Prologue
She sees lights. Lights in the sky—stars, she corrects herself—and lights from beautiful apartments with accomplished people inside. She is close to those people right now, very close, but she wonders if any of them will notice her dying.
She has never been the type to imagine her own death. In fact, she has felt immune to it, as if death was something that happened to other people. She always assumed there was time.
But there is precious little time left. It has been only an instant since it started, and she knows there are maybe one or two such moments left.
And strangely, there is relief.
1
I understand now that innocence is relative. I know that the night before I left for Rome, I felt jaded. After all we’d been through, I thought I’d aged somehow and lost my sparkle. I only wish I’d grasped then that the fall from innocence was a very long one.
“Why do you want to go to Italy with Kit?”
Nick sat on the bed and watched through the bathroom doorway as I went about my nighttime ministrations—cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream. Why I used all this crap, I wasn’t sure.
“I have a pitch at that architectural firm, and you can’t go because of work,” I answered. I leaned toward the mirror and dabbed cream around my left eye.
“You’ve hardly seen Kit in years,” Nick said.
“You don’t have to see a friend to be a friend.”
Although Kit had been a bridesmaid in our wedding four years ago, she’d moved to California shortly after to try her hand at acting. We didn’t talk every week, or even every month, but we never lost the bond best girlfriends have. After a few years of escalating credit-card debt and many failed auditions, Kit was back in Chicago, and I was more grateful than ever to have her near. At thirty-five, most of my friends were moms—what I thought I’d be, too—and they were no longer available for nights at wine bars, let alone trips to Rome.
“Why are you so worked up about this?” I asked Nick.
“I’m not, Rachel. I’m just curious.”
But my husband, Dr. Nick Blakely, was worked up. I could tell from the way he ran his fingers through his curly, close-clipped hair and rubbed at the spot between his eyes. He was also acting overly casual. His tie was loosened after a long day seeing patients, and he leaned back with one hand on the creamy ivory sheets of our bed, but there was a stiffness to the way he held himself.
“You have to be careful in Italy,” he continued. “Especially with the guys.”
“Is that right?” This came out sounding a bit like a taunt, and I let it hang in the air.
How strange that after all the therapy, after all the crying and the repiecing of our relationship, it was Nick who worried about me, as if retribution lay in wait around a corner somewhere.
“Nick, I’ve traveled to Rome before. I lived in Italy.”
“You were twelve when you lived there with your family, and it was for six months. And since then you’ve always traveled with me. Now it’s just you and Kit. I mean, I’m glad you’re going with someone, but you still have to be careful,” Nick said. “There are all sorts of guys who love to prey on American women.”
“I am quite sure I can handle the Italian men,” I said.
I took a second’s pleasure in the stricken look that flitted across his face, but even now, I hated to see him hurt.
“Nick,” I said, moving to the bed and sitting on his lap. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
On Saturday, Nick dropped Kit and me at O’Hare airport. The arrival gates were mobbed with cars and cabs, all with doors and trunks ajar. The May air was balmy, with sudden gusts of wind that sent stray papers floating into the air.
“Golden Girl,” Nick murmured, hugging me fiercely.
That nickname of mine had started with Kit. “Golden Child,” she used to call me when we were growing up. It was mostly based on my last name—Goldin—but it was also because I was an only child of relatively affluent parents, and I had, quite simply, enjoyed a very nice time of it. I knew that was true, even when I was young.
When I met Nick at an art-gallery party in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood, he immediately began calling me Golden Girl. Again there was my name, and Nick said he saw a gold light in my pale green eyes, too.
When we got married, despite changing my name to Blakely, I felt so lucky and so special I thought I would be the Golden Wife. I thought I’d have the Golden Life.
So far, it hadn’t turned out exactly like that.
I hugged Nick back, thinking that it was usually he who went away on business trips, leaving me at home, saying little prayers that the paper he had to present would go smoothly, that he was sleeping okay and not drinking too much or eating too poorly. But I was ready for some girls’ time with Kit. Now it was his turn.
Nick finally let me go but held one of my hands in his. He looked at Kit. “Have a nice time,” he said formally.
Nearly everyone talked to Kit that way since she’d returned from L.A. No one knew what to do with her, I suppose. She hadn’t quite found a career, she didn’t have a boyfriend or husband. She’d been a struggling actress in L.A., a hard-luck existence most of us in Chicago had little in common with. And yet Kit also had a sparkly kind of mystery about her. Even now, she wore rose-colored mirrored sunglasses and a taupe chiffon scarf around her neck, her rusty red hair tousled artfully. If she took off the glasses, you could see that her blue eyes were almost purple, depending on what she was wearing, and those eyes had a sly, knowing way about them. She looked like an intriguing woman, a Hollywood starlet on the lam. As one of her closest friends, though, I knew she was hurting from her failures out West.
“Thanks, Nick.” She smiled at him.
I breathed a sigh of gratitude for that grin. Those who knew about our marital problems were furious at Nick. They either refused to talk to him, or they made snide remarks when they did. I knew he was getting sick of being the whipping boy, and I didn’t like it, either. Although I could taunt him and stalk away all I wanted, I didn’t want anyone else treating him badly.
“Meet you at the ticket counter?” I said to Kit.
She readjusted the scarf around her neck. “Sure thing.”
I turned to him when she’d left. “What are you going to do while I’m gone?”
“Work. Miss you like crazy.”
I smiled. “Get some sleep, huh?”
Nick and I spent our evenings together again, but after I’d gone to bed, he would work late into the night on a new paper, hoping it would bring him a partnership. He’d gone into plastic surgery not for the glamour surgeries and the money they brought, but for the real treatments that could help people. But now that he was at the best plastic surgery office in the city, he had to perform those glam surgeries, and he had to publish to get promoted to partner.
“I doubt I’ll get much sleep,” Nick said. “I’ve got to take a couple of board members to dinner, too.”
“When do they decide?”
He rolled his eyes. “A month or so.”
Despite his feigned nonchalance, Nick was anxious about making it on The Chicago General Auxiliary Board—what everyone in the city called The board. It was a group of handpicked young and influential people who threw parties, ostensibly to raise funds for Chicago General Hospital, where Nick was on staff, but really to identify themselves as the crème de la crème of Chicago society. Nick wanted to get on the board not only to improve his chances of becoming partner, but also because he’d always been a member of the in-crowd growing up in Philadelphia. His father was a longstanding politician, and although the Blakelys had never been wealthy, they were exceptionally well connected and admired. They were invited to every soiree and function in town. When Nick took off for med school, and eventually his residency in Chicago, he said he was leaving Philly so that he wouldn’t ride his family’s coattails. But the limelight was a place where Nick was accustomed to being. He missed it. And although I could be just as happy in our basement painting my black-and-white photos as I could be at a grand charity ball, I supported Nick. I’d known our social life would be a busy one.
Nick kissed me on the forehead. “Good luck with your sales pitch, hon.”
I closed my eyes, leaned into him and inhaled the warm scent he always carried, as if he’d just come in from the sun. “Thanks. And really, Nick, make sure you sleep enough.”
“You know I only sleep with you.”
We both froze for a second. It was the kind of remark that was supposed to be light, but was now only a reference to what used to be true.
“Seriously,” Nick said, rushing in to fill the silence, to fix it. “I meant I’ll be up all night because I won’t know what to do without you.”
I took a step back and looked away. To my right, a dad struggled to extract a stroller from the trunk of his car. That was the kind of problem I thought Nick and I would be having at this point—how to fit the stroller in the car, where to put the crib, what color to paint the nursery.
“Rachel,” Nick said. “I’m sorry.”
I knew he was sick of apologizing, and the truth was, I was getting sick of hearing it.
“C’mere,” he said, pulling me to him again.
He kissed me, and despite myself, I responded. Before, we had been like everyone else. Now, we were passionate people, fighting for our relationship, and Nick was a man who couldn’t get enough of me.
“Be careful, okay?” he said, holding my face in his hands.
“Nick, I’m not gone that long.”
“Tell me you’ll be careful.”
“Of course I will be. I’ll strap my purse around me tight. I’ll watch out for gypsies.”
He studied my face. “I’ll miss you,” he whispered.
“I love you,” I said in response, because that was true, and it might not have been true to say I’d miss him.
2
It’s been said that Rome lacks the languid, friendly allure of other Italian cities, but the Roman mornings, at least to me, are undeniably charming. The colors stun the mind—the thousand shades of gold that are impossible to capture on film or in memory. Even when I’ve taken black-and-white photos of the city and painted on them, I can’t adequately capture a Roman morning—the way the sun gives a misty yellow glow to every corner of the city.
It was that pale yellow blush that struck me as we stepped out of our cab, just around the corner from the Piazza di Spagna.
“Wow,” Kit murmured for at least the tenth time since we’d landed. She embraced me as the cabbie lugged our bags from the trunk. “You are amazing for bringing me here.”
I had used most of my air miles to upgrade us both, and I had paid a few hundred dollars of Kit’s ticket, as well. Since moving back from L.A., Kit was short on cash. Not that this was anything new. I’d known Kit since first grade, and ever since her father died a few years after that, money had been tight. I used to pay her way into the movies and buy her bracelets at Claire’s Boutique so she could be like the rest of the girls. Money was even scarcer now. Kit told people she worked “in the marketing department of the Goodman Theatre,” which was true and sounded respectable enough, but the plainer truth was she was the department secretary. She collated, she stapled, she answered phones. She made very little money. What she had usually went toward the bills surrounding her mom’s cancer treatment.
“I’m glad to do it,” I told Kit, squeezing her hand. I was filled with a giddy feeling of promise, of a friendship renewed and, with the exception of my sales pitch tomorrow, a few days away from reality.
Kit and I checked into Il Palazzetto, a restored palazzo near the Spagna subway station. My mother had been to Rome the previous summer with her new husband, a real-estate mogul much older than she, and they’d stayed for two months at Il Palazzetto. She insisted Kit and I would be crazy to book anyplace else. When we stepped into the small foyer, I could see why.
The floor was a mosaic of colored stone. Sunlight flooded down the spiral marble staircase with its twisted, wrought-iron railings. On the second floor, our room had soaring ceilings, Roman columns and walls draped with gauzy, flowing fabric.
I opened the French window of our room, just in time to catch the sight of the pristine, white sun hitting the Spanish Steps.
I smiled over my shoulder at Kit.
“This is going to be good,” she said. Her voice told me she was excited in a way she hadn’t been in a long time. “This is going to be really good.”
I turned back toward the Roman morning and nodded.
Nearly everyone loves Italy. An adult who says, “Oh, I adore Italy” is like a child who says “I love Disneyland.” Of course you do.
The funny thing is that Italophiles believe it is they who have discovered Italy. They feel this love of all things Italian—the food, the ocher sunsets, the wine, the slow-moving life—which begins when they set foot on the dusty streets of Rome and ends when they head home. Every Italophile senses it is he who loves Italy more than the next, who understands her more deeply than the rest.
Kit and I were no exception. We had only three days to spend in Rome, so instead of sleeping the day away, we pushed past our jet lag and out into the city for a walk and some coffee.
We found a neighborhood bar in Piazza Navona, a long, U-shaped square with a tall obelisk and a Bernini sculpture and fountain in the middle. The piazza used to host chariot races, but now held cafés and strolling pedestrians.
“God, I needed this,” Kit said as we took our seat in front of the bar, our cappuccinos and a basket of rolls in front of us. She flipped back the napkin and offered the basket to me. I took a crescent roll, and she did the same.
“Me, too,” I said. “How’s your mom?”
She shrugged, her taupe chiffon scarf lifting around her face. “She’s doing everything she’s supposed to, but she knows the chemo is killing her at the same time it’s supposed to be curing her.”
“That’s horrible.” I thought how lucky I was to have two healthy parents. Healthy, divorced, never-speak-to-each-other parents, but who could knock it? “I’m sorry,” I said. Ineffective words.
“We’ll be all right.” Kit shook her hair away from her face. That wavy russet hair was one of the things that drew people to Kit. Not just men, who were staring at her even now as they passed us on their way to work, but the women, too. Her hair was glamorous, fiery—two traits most women wanted a little more of.
“God, look at her, will you?” Kit nodded toward a gaunt, striking Italian woman who was crossing the piazza. She wore a short black skirt and a pink shawl. Her black hair was swept up in a knot atop her head, and she clicked past us smartly in four-inch herringbone stilettos, despite the treacherous cobblestones.
“What do you think?” Kit said. “She’s in advertising, right? Or maybe fashion?”
“She could be a secretary. Even the civil servants here are dressed to kill.”
“Right, but her husband has money. She’s definitely married.”
We both peered at the woman’s left hand, and sure enough, there was a diamond ring that looked large even from a distance. “You got it,” I said.
This was a game Kit liked to play—guessing at people’s lives, then inserting herself mentally into those lives as far as she could. It was what had led her to acting.
Kit turned back to me. “Speaking of being married,” she said, “how’s Nick?”
“Fine. I think.”
“You think?” Kit’s eyes narrowed in concern.
After Nick’s affair last year, which took place over the span of a weeklong medical seminar in Napa, he had confessed months later. It was a Tuesday night, and I was slicing a tomato for salad. The time was 8:07 p.m. I remember this, because I held the knife in one hand and the large tomato in the other. The tomato’s juice was seeping like blood, and it suddenly seemed obscene, morbid. I checked the microwave clock, wondering if I had a few minutes before Nick came home to make something else, something more benign like spinach salad.
I hadn’t heard the door open, but I heard the creak of a floorboard in our house on Bloomingdale Avenue. Nick stepped into our kitchen and began crying so hard, his immaculate doctor’s hands cradling his face, that I thought someone had died. He had no idea why he’d done it, he said. He could only say that he wanted—needed—something new. He had felt it like a constant, terrible itch. But now the only thing new was how much he hated himself. I stood silently through his confession. When I found my voice, I begged him to tell me it was only one night. I might be able to deal with only one night. Nick shook his head and cried some more.
I made him move out for three months. I walked around stripped bare, so that the most mundane things inspired tears. During that time, I realized that infidelity is about much more than the physicality of the act. Of course, the physical can’t be ignored. The raw images of Nick with some other woman—their mouths clinging, bodies locked—hounded me, even made me do the clichéd run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Despite my mental gymnastics to avoid such thoughts, I always imagined the woman as gorgeous, maybe with gleaming, honey-colored hair and a strong, tanned body. This helped, strangely, because it gave some reason to what Nick had done. He had been lured in by someone stunning—someone tall and blond and entirely different from me, with my small frame and dark hair.
She wasn’t anything special, Nick told me at least a hundred times, just someone he met at a Napa restaurant. He knew it was his fault, not hers, but he still hated her now that it was done. He hated Napa. He hated the restaurant where he’d met her.
It was at this point in these discussions I always held up my hand. “Stop. Please,” I’d say. Although I had an image of her in my mind, I didn’t really want to know about this woman. I didn’t want to hear about the restaurant where she waitressed or maybe that she was supporting a child or that her sister had died the previous year. I didn’t want anything to overly personalize her.
I stayed with him because, unlike Nick, I did not want something new. I wanted him, and us, and a family, and everything I’d invested in. Before he’d told me, we’d been ready to get pregnant. But instead of a baby, Nick’s infidelity got us a therapist, Robert Conan, whom we’d seen twice a week until recently.
Conan told me that the glorification of this woman as an Amazonian goddess was “certainly not healthy,” but it was the only way I could cope. I chose to view the woman as an otherworldly, goddess-type creature who’d floated into Nick’s path one day, led him astray for five nights, and then left our world, hopefully for the very hot hallways of hell.
Nick and I were officially back together, but I still had a hard time.
“One minute it’s like we’re back to normal,” I told Kit, “then the next he’ll say something or I’ll say something and we’ll remember.”
“And then?”
I took a bite of croissant. It was flaky and buttery but suddenly hard to swallow. “And then it’s awful.”
Sometimes I was in love with Nick, proud of how we’d weathered the storm that had swept through our lives. Sometimes—when I picked up a wine from Napa Valley or saw a TV show about infidelity—my insecurity raged. Sometimes I hated him.
“God, now I’m sorry,” Kit said. “What a sad pair we are.” She put her cup down and threw an arm around my shoulders, hugging me across the table.
I hugged her back. Throughout high school, college and my early years in Chicago, my life had been refracted through the lens of my girlfriends’ eyes, particularly Kit’s. When I got married and she’d moved, I thought I didn’t need the insights or affirmations as often. But now, to be in the company of a friend gave me an optimistic charge. A good bout of girlfriend bonding was exactly what I needed.
Over Kit’s shoulder, I saw the sun moving across the piazza and beginning to warm the gray stone man in the center of the sculpture. Water splashed from the fountain, cleansing him.
Sitting back, I raised my cup. “Let’s have a toast. To Italy, and to a wonderful few days of escape.”
“To fabulous fucking friends!” Kit said. She let out a little holler, which drew looks from the people in the bar, and we touched our cups together.
Kit and I spent a languid first day, moving from one overpriced store on the Corso to the next, laughingly enduring the saleswomen who glanced pityingly at our American fashions and wondered out loud (they didn’t know I understood) whether we could afford the skirts we were looking at.
We were giddy and goofy from lack of sleep, and this was Italy. Nothing bad could touch us. We had dinner on the Via Veneto, doted on by the rotund proprietress who was different in every way from the saleswomen we’d encountered.
“Eat! Eat!” she kept saying. “You are nothing but bones.”
Food kept appearing at our table like wrapped presents under the tree—saffron risotto with gold leaves, pink salmon drizzled green with dill sauce. So, too, the men appeared. “Married,” I kept murmuring, holding aloft my left hand, reveling in the attention but somehow proud again of my marital status, while Kit grinned and flirted and sent them away, even as they sent us sparkling decanters of chianti. We tripped home arm in arm, laughing with memories already made.
But the next morning I was walloped by a bout of jet lag that made the previous day’s tiredness seem like child’s play. I couldn’t believe I had to attend a meeting, much less make a lengthy pitch on complicated architectural software.
I showered, but it failed to wake me up. I left Kit in her sumptuous bed, with plans to see her after my meeting. I headed for a neighborhood bar, where I downed two espressos, neither of which had any effect other than to make me blink more often and feel more dazed.
A twenty-minute cab ride took me over the muddy Tiber River and through Trastevere, onto a tiny, winding, cobblestone street with stone palazzi on either side. The driver stopped and pointed at an iron gate with the number thirteen etched in the stucco. When I got out of the car, I saw a small brass plaque announcing Rolan & Cavalli, the largest architectural firm in Italy. A twinge of anticipation fluttered in my belly.
I had fallen into a sales career five years out of college, after I decided I had to get the hell out of advertising, an industry I’d misguidedly battled my way into. I thought I’d use sales as a sort of break, that I’d probably return to advertising (for no one truly left, one of my bosses had once said) and find a job at a better agency, or at least one that didn’t want me to specialize in the tedium that was account management. But I loved sales—the rush, the wondering, the cliff-like highs and even the lows.
The lows had been few until recently, when the economy slowed and construction slowed along with it, leaving many architects wondering if they really needed our pricey new software to help them design buildings. The U.S. offices of Rolan & Cavalli had finally come around and begun using the software after almost a year of my working on them. Now, I was here to convince the Roman architects that their Italian office needed the software as much as their American counterparts. Laurence Connelly, my boss in Chicago, was counting on me to land this account. “You’ll bowl over those Italians, Blakely,” he’d said in a rare attempt at encouragement. “Go get ’em.”
The gate buzzed, and I walked into a large courtyard with a white cherub fountain in the middle, a few cars and scooters parked to one side. On the opposite side of the courtyard, double doors made from heavy pine swung open and a portly man in his early fifties stepped outside, extending his hand.
“You are Rachel Blakely?” he said in formal, heavily accented English.
“Yes, hello.” I quickly crossed the courtyard and shook his hand.
“I am Bruno Cavalli. Benvenuto. Welcome to Roma.”
“Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.” I pumped his hand once more, surprised that the owner himself had greeted me.
I felt the exhilaration of an impending pitch, a potential sale. Sometimes being in sales was painful—particularly when you were faking your way through a cold call or getting shot down from a company you’d been working with for five years—but the anticipation and bursts of elation from my job had gotten me through Nick’s revelation about his affair. It had given me back some of the confidence he’d stolen. And here in Rome was potential. Here, I might close again.
Bruno showed me through the front doors and through a sitting room decorated in shades of sienna and white. We made small talk as we walked, passing offices and drawing tables. By the time we reached the conference room, a round space with a large, mahogany table in the center, I was feeling charged up and ready to sell Bruno and his team—four men and two women—on the excellence of our software.
Bruno introduced me to the team, and I thanked him in Italian, then switched to English. “Thank you all for having me and for your time today.”
One of the team members, a paunchy man in an olive green suit, turned his head and leaned an ear toward me. A few others nodded, but as I moved from a few introductory remarks into my pitch, I saw perplexed glances. I slowed my words, but I quickly realized that although Bruno had near-perfect English, his staff did not. Some knew a few words, but when it came to talking architecture, they were only used to Italian. As the confused looks around the table increased, my adrenaline faded.
Finally I halted my words. “Capite?” I said. Do you understand?
The man in the olive suit shook his head. A woman held up her hand and rocked it from side to side. “Cosi, cosi.”
I glanced at Bruno, who shrugged. “Italiano?” he said.
I struggled not to rub a distressed hand over my tired face. While it was true that I’d lived here for six months as a kid and studied Italian in college, and while it was also true that I could order wine with the best of them and eavesdrop on snotty saleswomen, I didn’t think I could give an entire pitch in Italian, certainly not to describe complex architectural concepts. My company, Randall Design, had sent me, knowing I was the only one in our sales team with any Italian skills, but I’d been given the impression that I would mostly rely on English, stepping in here and there with a few Italian phrases.
Still, I would give it my best shot. I launched into my pitch in my schoolgirl Italian. The first few sentences came out okay. Then I started to stumble. I had to halt frequently to think of the proper words, the proper tenses, how to form a sentence. Pitying glances came from around the table.
I shuffled along until I heard “Scusi!” in a high, cultured voice.
The speaker was a woman with white hair pulled back in a low knot. She had raised a delicate hand. A braided gold bracelet adorned her slender wrist.
“Si?” I said eagerly. Questions during a pitch gave me motivation; they revealed that the client might be interested.
But the white-haired woman rattled off a lengthy question at such a rapid speed I only picked up every fifth word or so.
I took a breath and tried to respond to what I thought she might be asking—a question about our 3D capability. I mangled a few words; I forgot others. A man to my right wore a look of complete confusion and leaned closer, as if I onlyneeded to talk more loudly. The woman with the white hair shook her head dismissively.
Bruno offered to translate, and the question-and-answer session, which should have taken ten minutes, took about forty. My pitch limped.
After two hours, Bruno stood from his chair. “Grazie, Rachel,” he said, looking at his watch. “If we might take a break.”
I nearly kissed him with gratitude.
But then he continued, “Two of our members will take you for a meal. We will finish this afternoon.” He spoke in Italian to the team members, all of whom nodded.
“Oh…” I said. I thought of Kit at the hotel, waiting for me. I’d promised we’d have the afternoon together, that I’d show her some of my favorite Rome sites, aside from the Gucci store. I thought of how badly I wanted a shower and a glass of wine and a nice long chat with my girlfriend.
But Bruno was giving me another chance, one I needed and appreciated.
“Thank you so much. That would be lovely,” I said. “Could I please use your phone?”
I called Kit from Bruno’s office and apologized. She was silent for a moment. “It’s okay, Rachel,” she said then. “I’ll just go wander. Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’ll need it.”
My hatchet job of the language continued its shamble at the ristorante, where they took me to lunch. There was no reprieve, only more questions about the software—questions that took me decades to decipher and centuries to answer. This sorry situation continued during my afternoon presentation of the product itself. I noticed every sigh from the team members who couldn’t understand me. I saw them glancing at their watches.
When the meeting ended—finally—I buttoned my jacket and shook Bruno’s hand. They’d consider the software and let me know, he said. Yet when I met his eyes, I could see the decision was already made, and the answer was no.
I walked through the office, tapped of all strength, mental, physical or otherwise. How wonderful it had sounded back at the office—oh, I’m going to Rome for a meeting! But the reality had been as fun as the middle seat on an overnight flight.
3
Slumped in the back of the cab, I began to think of how I’d tell my boss, Laurence, the news. He wouldn’t be pleased.
I paid the cabdriver and tried to cheer myself up by thinking about a night out with Kit. Professional disaster or no, there were bottles of wine around the city, just waiting for us to open them.
But when I got back to the room, there was a note.
Rach,
Met the most amazing guy! He works for the French embassy. He’s taking me to some place called Ketumbar. I figured you’d be exhausted and would want to sleep. See you later tonight. (Maybe!)
Kit
P.S. I hope your pitch went great. I’m sure it did. Thanks again for bringing me to Rome. I’m in love with this city!
I tried not to be disappointed. I’d left her alone all day, after all, and she was right, I was exhausted.
I took off my clothes and slipped on the heavy, silk hotel robe. Then I made the dreaded phone call to Laurence and told him about the pitch. “The owner told me before I left that his team spoke English, but they couldn’t understand the whole pitch.”
“I thought you spoke Italian.”
“Not well enough to get through a whole pitch.”
Silence on the other end.
“This is not good timing, Blakely,” he said, his voice as prim and severe as a schoolmarm’s. “We lost the Ricewell account today.”
“What?” Ricewell was a huge architectural firm, and one of our biggest clients. Their purchases of our software, and its yearly updates, accounted for a large portion of our profits. “What happened?”
“I can’t go into it now. Randall wants to talk to me.” Terry Randall was the company’s not-so-pleasant owner. He made Laurence seem like an easygoing beach bum. “You’re sure Cavalli isn’t going to buy?” Laurence asked.
The afternoon flashed before me—the disdainful glances from the white-haired woman, sympathetic ones from Bruno. “I’m pretty sure.”
“Jesus, Blakely, I didn’t need this. I’ll see you when you get back. And have a great time over there.” His voice was thick with sarcasm. “I’m glad somebody’s getting a vacation.” He hung up.
I lay back on the bed and dialed Nick’s work number. It was late morning in Chicago, and it was his day to see patients at the office, but I wanted to hear his voice.
Tina, the receptionist, answered. “Hi, Rachel!” she said cheerily. “How’s Rome?”
I turned my head on the pillow and looked around the room. The windows were open, the breeze making the curtains sway and billow. “Beautiful. Thanks for asking. Hey, is Nick busy?”
“He’s not in today.”
“What do you mean?”
“He took today off. It’s super warm here, like almost eighty degrees. He said something about golf.”
“Oh, all right.”
But Nick didn’t golf anymore, at least not unless he had to. He had played on his high school team in Philadelphia, an intense experience that diminished his love for the game, and so now he played with the other doctors at his office only when he felt forced to do so for appearance’ sake.
“Did anyone else take the day off?” I asked hopefully. “Like Dr. Adler or Dr. Simons?”
“Nope,” Tina said, cheerful as ever.
I got off the phone and dialed our home number, trying to hold my flaring suspicions at bay. Maybe he was just using golf as an excuse, and he was home working on his paper. Maybe he was coming down with a cold. My own voice on the machine answered after four rings, politely asking callers to leave their name and number. I hung up and dialed Nick’s cell phone. It went right to voice mail, as if turned off by someone who very much did not want to be reached.
Something as heavy as lead crept into my chest.
I got up from the bed and went to the French windows. I pushed them farther open, hoping the sight of the Spanish Steps would lift my spirits, but the orange glow of the sun setting somewhere over the city only made me melancholy for company, for my husband, or at least the husband I used to have. The white marble steps seemed covered with couples taking in the coming twilight. As far as my eye could see, people were holding hands, speaking softly into each other’s ears.
Where was he? Why take off work on a Monday, only two days after I’d left? Why hadn’t he mentioned it?
I thought about all the talks we’d had after his affair. Why, why, why? I’d asked over and over. Whydid you do it? Nick shook his head, his eyes anguished and disbelieving, as if he couldn’t quite accept what he’d done. He said it was a product of his boredom, his worries about whether he’d make partner at the office, whether he’d make it onto the board. He needed something new and exciting to distract him, and when she walked into his life in Napa, he felt she would bring him that excitement, if only momentarily. He swore there was nothing wrong with our relationship. He wasn’t bored with me, he kept saying. He wasn’t harboring any kind of resentment toward me.
In some ways, I was relieved by his answers, or lack of them. Because I didn’t want anything to be inherently wrong with us. I wanted Napa to be a colossal, bumbling, impulsive mistake.
But I’d never stopped to think that maybe he couldn’t control such impulses. I didn’t even ask if he wanted to.
I shut the windows and yanked off my robe. I started the shower, turned the heat high and stepped inside, letting the water pound my skin.
He’s at it again. That was all I could think. It wasn’t the goddess from Napa this time, but someone else. Unbelievable. How smug I’d been this week, thinking how much he’d miss me. How sure I’d been of his devotion when I turned my back to him at the airport.
Nick’s career couldn’t handle a divorce right now. Hadn’t he told me that in so many words while we were seeing the therapist? We’d sat side by side on the maroon leather couch in Conan’s office, while Conan himself, a large man with a trim gray beard, sat on a wide leather recliner.
How had Nick put it? “Rach, listen, I know this is unfair, but I have to ask you something. It’s…” His words drifted off, and he gave me a guilty glance.
“Go ahead, Nick,” Conan prompted. “Everyone is entitled to a request here.”
Nick nodded. “I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell so many people about our…our troubles.”
It was our second visit when Nick said this, and I looked at him with disgust. “You slept with another woman. Over and over for a week.” I saw Conan studying me as my voice drove up in volume, so I took a breath and lowered it. “And now you want me to be quiet?”
“I am so sorry, Rachel,” Nick said. He reached out and touched my leg. “Like I said, I realize this isn’t fair. But you know how they are at the office.” In short, the partners at his medical practice looked favorably not only upon exceptional surgical skills and the publishing of papers, but also on charitable work and a clean, traditional private life.
I had assumed Nick wanted our marriage to work because he loved me, because he made that colossal, impulsive mistake, but now I began to wonder if he’d just been patching things up until he was a partner and a member of the board, when he could do anything he wanted with his life.
In the shower, a few frustrated tears slipped from my eyes, but after a minute, I began to hate my own confusion and self-pity.
I got out of the shower and called Nick’s cell phone three more times in quick succession. I started to despise the sound of his cheerful yet soothing physician’s voice—You’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Nick Blakely. Please leave me a message. If this is a medical emergency…
I called the concierge and asked her to make a reservation at a good restaurant within walking distance. I dried my hair, recklessly directing the hair dryer any which way, never lifting the brush from the counter, so that the natural, erratic waves took over my dark hair. I put on black pants and high-heeled satin sandals. No more feeling sorry for myself. I had no idea what Nick was doing, but I was in Rome, and I was going out for the night.
As I walked to the restaurant, I filled up with the feeling I always got when I was in Rome—satiated though I hadn’t yet eaten, overwhelmed by antiquity even though I hadn’t yet waited in line to see anything. Beauty and history surround you in Rome. They’re inescapable, and their presence buoyed me, if only for a few moments.
The last time I’d been in Rome, Nick and I had strolled hand in hand over cobblestone streets, me gripping his arm when we crossed particularly choppy spots, and we stopped at nearly every os-teria for a glass of wine.
I pushed the thoughts of Nick from my mind as I spied Dal Bolognese, the restaurant where the concierge had booked me. It was tucked next to one of Piazza del Popolo’s twin churches. The place had white tablecloths and umbrellas out front. Soft light and classical music spilled from the white-curtained windows.
I stepped inside and looked around, my eyes immediately landing on a man talking to the maître d’. He wore tan linen slacks and a long-sleeved maroon shirt. His hair was dark brown, his skin tanned, and faint lines ran from his eyes to his full mouth. He had one hand on the maître d’s shoulder.
For some reason, the man turned to me as if expecting me. His expression when his eyes met mine said, Ah, there you are.
For a moment I forgot where I was. I don’t know how long I met his gaze. Surely it was too long, for the maître d’stepped around him, and said, “Madame?”
I stayed mute, still looking at this man, who felt brand-new and at the same time intensely familiar. One side of his maroon shirt collar had fallen aside, and I was drawn to the sight of his tanned skin below his collarbone.
“Madame?” the maître d’ said again.
I dragged my eyes away, but I could still feel him staring at me.
“Prenotazione per uno,” I managed to say. “Blakely.” I felt relieved to have spoken in coherent Italian, even if it was just a few words.
“Si, si,” the maître d’ said, glancing down at the reservation book. “Your table, here.” He gestured toward an umbrellaed table in front of the restaurant. “Please.”
I took a step to follow, but I couldn’t help stopping and turning. The man in the linen shirt was still standing there. He was still watching me.
“Your table,” I heard the maître d’say behind me.
“I should go,” I said to the man. Stupidly, I realized. He was a few feet away from me, and why was I talking to him at all? He hadn’t even spoken.
Feeling foolish, I turned again, followed the maître’ d and gratefully took my seat, hiding my face with a tall, leather wine menu.
I ordered buffalo mozzarella and asparagus to start, then porcini risotto. While I waited for my food, I sipped from a glass of crisp white wine. But I hardly noticed the tart apple flavor as I glanced around the restaurant. Where had he gone? But then, what did it matter? I quickly finished the glass and ordered another.
I ate my mozzarella when it came. The cheese was so fresh, it must have been made that day. Yet I had to struggle to appreciate it, more focused on the fact that the restaurant was full to capacity, and everyone was having a delightful time. With their friends. With their spouses.
I ordered another glass of wine with my risotto, a creamy concoction that somehow turned my stomach. I pushed the rice around on my plate, imagining Nick in the bed of some woman. Then a thought struck me. He might have her—whoever the hell she was—in our bed. I was glad I wasn’t in Chicago then. I could easily become one of those people who chased their straying spouse with a semiautomatic.
The waiter had just handed me my bill when the man I’d seen earlier appeared at my side.
“Ciao,” he said. His voice was low, smooth.
“Ciao,” I answered.
“I will call you then.”
I blinked a few times. “Pardon me?”
“I would like to call you.”
“Look, you don’t know me…”
He smiled. It was a kind smile, one that bore the experience of many years. I thought he must be in his mid-forties. How is it that Italians wear their age so well?
“You are alone in the city?” he said.
“No, no. I’m with a friend.” I realized the ridiculousness of this statement.
“Please,” he said simply. The collar of his shirt, which I could tell up close was made from a soft, and probably very expensive linen, had fallen aside again. He made a gesture to right it. His tanned hands were long and elegant and dotted with splatters of paint. Artist’s hands.
“You don’t know where I’m staying,” I said somewhat coquettishly. I felt a xpleasing blaze in my stomach at my boldness.
“Yes,” the man said. “True.” There were flecks of green in his smiling brown eyes. “Where shall I call you?”
I shook my head and forced out a little laugh. I knew Italian men loved to seduce American women, the thought being that they were—sexually speaking—much easier when on the road, particularly in Europe. I wasn’t one of those women, although clearly this man thought I was.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t do this.” I put some euros on my bill. Feeling silly, I stood. “Excuse me, I have to go.”
The man bowed slightly, then stepped aside. “Of course.”
I moved around him and without looking back, I headed out into the warm Rome night.
When I pushed open the door to our room, I saw that Kit was still gone. I checked for messages. There were none, not from my husband or Kit.
I called Nick’s phone. That grating message again. I called home. No answer.
I slipped between the cool white sheets, and waited for sleep to envelop me. I dozed, my mind working through short bursts of dreams, all of them unintelligible but filled with the color of Rome’s gold. I awoke and kept thinking about the man, although I knew this was illogical. I turned over in bed.
Just as I did, the phone rang—an unfamiliar bleat that reminded me I was far from home. I sat up and stared at the phone. I looked over at Kit’s empty bed, then lifted the receiver.
“Hello?” I said. “Pronto?”
“Giorno.” It wasn’t Nick. It wasn’t Kit. It was him. I just knew. “Giorno,” he said again when I didn’t respond.
“Is it morning?” I said.
“Soon.”
A pause.
“How did you get my number?” I asked.
“My friend who works at the ristorante. He told me where you were staying.”
“Oh.” More than anything, I was surprised at how flattered I felt that he’d searched me out.
“Please do not be angry. It is hard to explain, but I feel I have to see you, to know you.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You will meet me?”
I thought of Nick. Of course I did. And the image of him, which should have stopped me—his round brown eyes, his curly, light brown hair, the constellation of freckles over his cheeks—instead incensed me.
I threw back the sheets and said, “Yes.”
4
“Ciao,” I called to the sleepy guy at the bell desk, as if I always left my hotel by myself in the wee hours to meet a man who was not my husband.
I stepped out into the inky night. The kiosk across from the hotel, which sold water and pizza, was closed, the apartments surrounding the hotel dark. It was not nearly morning, as the man had said, and daylight seemed far away, as if I might never see the sun again. I liked that thought.
My body felt light, made of air. I moved down the street like a patch of fog. He had told me to meet him halfway up the Spanish Steps. As I took the first white marble stair, I halted. The Spanish Steps are hundreds of feet wide and sky-high, so what exactly did “halfway” mean? The first landing? The second? Ignoring the questions, ignoring common sense, I climbed.
My shoes went tap, tap, tap as I padded upward, and in my chest, behind my ribs, a drumbeat of anticipation began.
I glanced up for a moment and saw the moon—a small, yellow globe—and the dark sky behind it. The steps were nearly empty of their usual crowd, but somewhere on them, young Italian men were singing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few pairs of lovers. No single man in a linen shirt. My eyes climbed the huge stairway for him. Maybe he wouldn’t come? Relief. Disappointment.
At the second landing, I turned and stared down toward the fountain. A few stragglers were gathered around it. Maybe he was one of them? Had I walked right past him? But he’d said “halfway.” I remembered that for sure. Maybe “halfway” was some Italian lingo. The confusion nearly pulled me from my dreamlike state. I started to process what I was doing, or at least how I hadn’t a clue of what I was doing.
But when I turned back to look up the steps, he was there.
“Ciao,” he said.
“Ciao.”
He came to me and took one of my hands. I felt a flutter through my belly and my limbs. “I don’t know your name,” he said.
“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.
“Are you ready for that benefit coming up?” I asked Nick.
I loved afternoons like this, conversations like this. They made me forget what I’d done in Rome and how I’d never been able to confess.
Nick gave a rueful laugh. “The printers haven’t done the programs yet, and of course that’s my department.”
“Well, you’re on the board now,” I said in a teasing tone. “You’ll have to handle it.”
Nick had finally made it onto the board, but he was essentially a pledge in a grown-up fraternity. As low man on the totem pole and someone trying to make it as an official member, he’d been given much of the unglamorous work that went into planning the board’s benefits and charity balls.
“Why did you ever let me join?” he said.
I turned, a wet cotton ball in my hand, and smirked. We both knew he loved being on the board. He loved the kudos it brought him from the docs at his office and the new friends it brought into our lives. The limelight he’d grown up in was back—albeit a tiny, probationary light. The truth was we were both on trial for the board. As a result, we were busier than ever with dinners and cocktail parties and lavish benefits. It tired me more easily than it did Nick, who preferred to gripe grudgingly and enjoy every second. And ultimately, seeing him pleased made me more happy than anything else.
As I turned back toward the photo, my eyes landed on the wall, on Roberto’s painting, still hung where Nick had insisted, right above my table. My stomach swooped and sank, as it did every time I saw it.
I’d told Nick the painting was a souvenir. He took that to mean it was a symbol of a memorable Roman trip, and he wanted such a thing in the new room he’d created. But to me, it was mostly symbolic of a grave mistake. The fact that my husband had put it there tortured me.
Every once in a great while, though, when I was able to push past the guilt, the painting was a symbol of sex and confidence and desire, all of which I’d lacked for a while before Rome. But now Nick and I had those things again. The sex was passionate and the ghosts were gone. It was as if my night with Roberto had driven away the woman Nick slept with in Napa. I knew that such a thought was somehow sick and wrong—what kind of person needed a matching bout of infidelity to cancel out the other?—but the effect couldn’t be denied. I no longer thought of the woman as a goddess. I no longer felt insecure or bruised. I realized how much I loved this man, my husband, and because of that, we’d grown assured again in our relationship.
“Nick,” I said impulsively.
“Yeah, hon?”
“I want to take down this painting.”
“Your Rome painting?”
I nodded.
“It looks great in here. Why?”
I stared at its slashes of red and gazed at the girl, who seemed to be me, in the middle of it. My throat threatened to close. “I just don’t like it anymore. I don’t need it.”
When Kit and I had returned from Rome, I agonized over whether to tell Nick about Roberto. Nick hadn’t told me about his affair until a few months after Napa, but the point was he had eventually. He’d had enough respect for me, and for us, to come clean with his sins. In those weeks after Rome, I understood how impossibly difficult that must have been for him, and I cherished him all the more for it. But I found I couldn’t do the same. Not because I didn’t respect him as much, or our marriage. On the contrary, I adored him; I adored us, the way we were now, again. It was simply that we’d already been through too much. Another transgression would splinter us irrevocably.
It sounded like a cop-out to my own ears, yet in my gut I believed it to be true. And so I kept my mouth shut, and a little piece of my heart grew black from the secret, the lack of fresh air. But it was my fault, I reckoned, my cross, and I was bearing it willingly. I didn’t need the painting to remind me.
“What will we put there?” Nick asked.
“My photo paintings. I’ll be done with this one by the end of the week, and I know I’ll get it right this time.”
“Out with the old, in with the new?”
“Exactly.” If the painting was gone, maybe I could forget. Maybe I could forgive myself.
Nick stood from the chair, the newspapers crinkling. “Let me help you, then.”
Together, we leaned over the high table and each took a bottom corner of the canvas. Carefully, we lifted it higher, then together we pulled it away from the wall.
“There,” Nick said.
“Yeah.” I grinned. The wall looked clean now, ready for the future. I stowed the canvas in the closet.
Nick crossed the room and hugged me. I pressed myself into him, my arms around his back and felt myself stir. “Want to go upstairs?”
He groaned softly. “Absolutely.”
The phone rang. “Don’t answer it.” I ran my tongue up the side of his neck.
“Let me make sure it’s not the service.” Nick grabbed the phone off the arm of the big chair and looked at the display. “Kit,” he said.
I took his hand and began leading him up the stairs. “Definitely don’t answer it.”
I hadn’t spoken to Kit very often since we returned. She spent much of her time with her mom or on the phone with Alain. But the truth also was that Kit made me think of Rome, and I wanted to forget it. In the same way I’d wanted the painting out of sight, I was inadvertently avoiding Kit.
Nick and I climbed the basement stairs, passed through our living room which was overly warm with late-afternoon sun, and went up the stairs to our bedroom.
At the foot of the bed, we kissed hard, our hands clawing at our clothes.
The phone rang again. “Sorry,” Nick mumbled. He twisted away and glanced at the bedroom phone on the nightstand. “Kit again.”
I lightly bit his collarbone. “Ignore it.”
But a minute later, the phone rang again.
“You better get it,” Nick said, slightly panting, his shirt off, his pants halfway down.
I groaned but grabbed the phone and answered it, holding my discarded T-shirt over my breasts.
“Rachel?” Kit said.
“Yeah, hi. What’s up?”
She broke into sobs.
“Kit, what’s wrong?”
“It’s my mom,” she said, still crying. “It’s everything.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the hospital.”
In the parking lot of Chicago General Hospital, the sun beat on new asphalt, making my shoes stick as I hurried from my car. Inside the doors, the arctic blast of air-conditioning made me shiver.
I wrapped my arms around myself, realizing I had no idea where I was supposed to go.
“Cancer center,” said the woman at the information desk, handing me a map of the hospital campus. Chicago General was a vast complex, only a block from Lake Michigan, and although my husband was on staff, I rarely had occasion to visit.
I headed back outside, into the stifling afternoon. Using the map, I tracked down the cancer center and the chemotherapy unit, where Kit’s mom, Leslie Kernaghan, was supposed to be. And there was Kit, standing outside a glass-walled room, small tears skimming her features.
She smiled bleakly when she saw me. Her face was splotchy and her eyes were pink and raw, making their purplish hue sharper. Her red hair was flattened on one side, as if she’d just been roused from sleep.
I hugged her, then brushed her tears away with my knuckles. “What’s going on?” I looked inside the glass wall and saw Mrs. Kernaghan, or at least a withered, gray version of her, sleeping on a hospital gurney, tubes in her nose, IVs in her arm.
Kit took a deep breath, which caught in her lungs. “She needs this procedure tomorrow. It’s a new radiation treatment combined with chemo. It’s experimental, but it’s her best chance to survive. The thing is, the insurance isn’t covering anything anymore.” Kit stopped and her shoulders shuddered. More tears streamed from her eyes. “But Alain told me he’d pay for it.”
“Oh, how sweet,” I said.
“He said he’d wire the money right away. We didn’t get it. Then he told me yesterday he was getting on a plane. He was going to come here for the procedure, and he was going to pay for it.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, it sounded great,” Kit said bitterly.
I could guess the rest. Situations like this, where men disappointed on grand scales, were always happening to Kit. “He didn’t come.”
She shook her head. “He said he had an embassy function he couldn’t miss, and there were problems transferring money overseas. When my mom found out, she started panicking. You should have seen her, Rach. She couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were bulging.”
I put my arm around her.
“She’s stabilized now,” Kit continued. “I talked the doctor into doing the radiation tomorrow, but they’ll never let us do chemo without payment. It might be the only thing that can save her.”
Kit started to sob—quietly and desperately—with her hand against the glass wall, as if to touch her mom.
I tightened my arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Honey, I’m sorry. Doesn’t the Chicago General Board have a fund to help cancer patients?”
Kit gave a curt shake of her head. “They helped us a year ago, when mom was having surgery, but they cut us off.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “There’s a cap on how much they’ll give one person, I guess. We don’t qualify anymore.” She turned to face me. “What am I going to do?”
“Could you get a second mortgage on her condo?”
“It’s an apartment. She rents.”
“I could get Nick to talk to the board. He’s a member now, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, he’s what they call an associate member. He hasn’t officially made it yet. But I’ll talk to him, and maybe the board can help you out again.”
“That’ll take too long. We need help now.”
“Then we’ll give you the money.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course. I should have thought of it sooner. How much is it?”
“Three grand.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“I know it’s a lot, but…” She looked at her mom again, and her face twisted in agony.
“It’s fine. I’ll talk to Nick, and I’ll come back—”
“No, don’t,” Kit said. “Please don’t tell Nick.”
“Why?”
“I’m embarrassed. And my mother is, too. She hates being a charity case. Please.”
I thought about our finances. We had joint checking and saving accounts, as well as joint investments. If I took money from any of those, Nick would notice. But I also had my own savings, started long before Nick and I were together.
Kit sank her face into her hands, her shoulders trembling. “I just don’t know how much more I can take.”
I kissed her on the head. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll get you the money. I’ll go talk to your mom now, and then I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning, okay?”
She raised her head and gave me a fierce hug. “You are a good friend.” She said it in a way that implied she hadn’t been so sure about that a moment before.
On Monday morning, I went to work at seven. With the office cool and still empty, I checked my e-mail, returned calls from Friday and made appointments to call on an architectural firm the next day. As other employees trickled in, I checked my watch, waiting for nine o’clock, when my bank would open its doors and I could get Kit the money she needed. Because I was getting the funds from a savings account, I couldn’t write a check.
At five minutes to nine, my boss, Laurence Connelly, stepped into my office. His suit coat was already off, and he wore his usual suspenders, a too-shiny pink tie and a smirk. “How’s it going, Blakely?”
“Just fine.” I tried a smile, but since I’d gotten back from Rome without the Rolan & Cavalli account, things had been icy between Laurence and me. Every time Laurence tossed it in my face, which was often, I was reminded not only of my failure at the meeting but how I’d failed my marriage, as well.
“How was your weekend?” I asked.
He ignored the pleasantry. “Are you seeing the Baxter Company soon?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Get them to up their service agreement. We need that cash. Got it?” I knew what he was saying behind the obvious words—salespeople who didn’t bring in that cash could be fired. He’d already let four people go this year.
I stood, signaling the end of the conversation. “I know that, Laurence. That’s why I’m going to see them.”
“And what about Thompson & Sons?”
“I’m calling on them today.” I tossed my purse over my shoulder and reached for my sunglasses at the edge of my desk.
“Where are you going?”
“To the bank.”
He crossed his arms. “You can do your banking at lunch.”
I thought of Kit’s mom, tubes extending from her arms, like a battered boat tethered to a dock. “It’s important personal business. I’ll be back soon.”
“This is the business you need to be concerned about.” He pointed to the floor with a stubby, manicured finger.
I moved toward the doorway, hoping he’d step back. “I made my numbers last month.” Translation: Back off, blowhard.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re doing too well this month.”
“And that’s why I’m seeing the Thompson people today and Baxter tomorrow.”
He wasn’t moving. I knew Kit was at Chicago General, pacing, waiting for me, while her mother waited, too.
I angled a shoulder and pushed past him, trying to ignore the heavy, musky cologne he apparently thought was sexy. “See you later, Laurence.”
Outside on Monroe Street, the August air lay like steam over the Loop. People rushed for the doors of buildings—and for the air-conditioning—the same way we all rushed for warm shelter in the winter. I got in a cab and directed the driver north to Lincoln Park Savings & Loan, the small community bank where I’d done my banking since college and where Nick and I had opened accounts after we got engaged. We no longer lived in the neighborhood, and it was rare that either of us actually had to visit the branch.
I stepped inside the chilly confines of the bank and waited in line for one of the three tellers who appeared unruffled by the fifteen or so people already waiting for their services.
Ten minutes later, I finally made it to a teller.
“How can I help you?” asked a young man wearing a white shirt and blue tie.
“I need a money order for three thousand made out to Katherine Kernaghan.”
I thought of Nick then. I should tell him—I should come clean about something—but this was merely aid for a friend who desperately needed it, with money that was truly mine, which I’d earned. And Kit had asked me not to mention it.
The rationalizations didn’t help much. It only reminded me of the other, larger, secret I’d kept from him.
Two minutes later, I was in another stuffy, airless cab, speeding toward Chicago General.
Kit had changed clothes from the day before, but she was standing in the same place, her hand on the glass window.
I stood next to her and looked inside. Her mom was being tended to by a thermometer-wielding nurse in pink scrubs.
“How’s she doing?” I said.
“Same.” Kit’s voice was devoid of emotion.
“Are you working this week?”
“Goodman gave me the week off.”
“That’s nice.”
“Yeah.” Neither of us moved. “Were you able to get the money?”
“Of course.” I handed her a white envelope with the money order inside. I felt like I was doing something illicit.
Kit took it and put it in her purse. “It’s unfair, isn’t it?” she said, still looking at her mom. The nurse had finished up, and signaled Kit that she could come in. Kit barely nodded in return.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s entirely unfair.”
“Some people get nothing in life. They never get a goddamned thing. And then other people get it all, no matter what they do.”
“Yeah,” I said, not exactly sure what she meant.
She turned to me. Her eyes were clear again, not red like last night. “Like you, Golden Child. Everything is perfect for you.”
I opened my mouth. I was about to remind her of Nick’s affair, of my own, of my parents’ divorce and my sliding status at work, of how I’d thought I’d be a mother by this time in my life but how my marital problems had derailed that plan. But the fact was, despite it all, I knew those were not the world’s worst problems. I knew how fortunate I was. So I just nodded.
“Yep,” Kit said, with bitterness in her tone. She turned back to the window. “Everything works out for you.”
I felt stung by her words, but I knew she was hurting and scared, so I said nothing. I went inside the glass door and said hello to her mother. And then I left. In the cab, heading toward the Loop, I realized that Kit hadn’t thanked me.
7
Oftentimes, when I think back about Kit, I try to put my finger on the exact minute it all began to crumble and slide. When an earthquake happens, there’s always a quiet rumble that starts the disastrous movement. Sometimes I think that rumble might have gone as far back as our childhood together. Other times I think maybe it was the moment at the hospital, outside her mother’s room. But no matter where it started or why, I can always pinpoint the moment I knew with certainty the slide had begun—the night of the Weatherbys’ dinner party.
We’d been told it was “a get-together with just a few board members,” and being a Monday night I’d envisioned pizza and beer. I should have known better. The members of the board always lived large.
“A toast to one more month of summer,” said Joanne Weatherby that night. “And to Nick and Rachel.” She raised a glittering champagne glass.
The dinner crowd of twelve responded with clinking glasses and inquiring smiles sent our way.
“Eat, eat,” Joanne said, taking her seat. She was a tiny, blond woman and had been the executive director of the board for twenty-five years. This impressed me as much as her gargantuan, two-story, candlelit Michigan Avenue apartment, her designer clothes and the fact that, from what I’d heard, neither Joanne nor her husband had ever held a job.
“If I could just say a word,” Nick said, standing and holding up his glass. “Rachel and I are very glad to have met you all. We feel fortunate to call you friends.” He paused to take in the nods from the group, then raised his glass a little higher. “To the success of the board.”
The group raised their glasses once again. “To the board!”
When Nick had taken his seat once more—on one of the white, silk-covered chairs I was terrified of spilling on—and appetizer dishes of caviar had been served, all eyes fell on us. Again.
“So, Rachel, where do you two live in the city?” asked Valerie Renworth, a thin, raven-haired woman with round green eyes.
I should have anticipated such a question. After all, this was what it had been like since Nick made the board—dinners and charity balls and lots and lots of questions for the new couple. It was as if Nick and I were getting our fifteen minutes of fame in a certain, tony Chicago crowd. But we both knew this was a trial. We hadn’t been truly accepted yet.
Unfortunately, I was in mid-bite when Valerie asked her question, and the saltiness of the caviar caught in my throat. I coughed it down, tried for a discreet sip from my water glass and answered as fast as I could. “Bloomingdale Avenue. Do you know it?”
Valerie shook her head.
“Well, not many people do know it,” I said, warming to my topic. “It’s this tiny street south of Armitage. It runs only for a few blocks alongside an old train line. We’ve got a little bungalow there.”
“It sounds charming.” Coming from someone else, this could have been a backhanded slight, but Valerie had an easy, open way about her, and I smiled in return. I suppose she was used to people liking her. She was married to Charles Renworth, a man I had yet to meet since he was often out of town on business, but whom everyone knew owned half the commercial real estate in the Midwest.
“It is charming,” I said, glancing at Nick. “My lovely husband built me an artist’s studio in our basement. It’s the perfect house now.”
“Except for the cab situation,” Nick said. “In terms of taxi availability, we might as well live in Gurnee.”
Everyone laughed. I shot a confused look at Nick. Like me, he rarely said anything bad about our adopted street. Bloomingdale was like a member of the family, whose faults would never be discussed in public.
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Laura Caldwell
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: It was an affair…to regret.Rachel Blakely′s charmed life is significantly tarnished after her husband Nick′s infidelity, but she wants to give her marriage a second chance. Then a business trip to sun-drenched Rome with her best girlfriend Kit leads to a night of passion with a stranger–a one-night stand meant to signify the end of a painful chapter in her life.Rachel returns home determined to put the past behind her, and at first life seems golden again. Nick is more loving than ever, and following his promotion to senior partner in a prestigious plastic surgery practice, the couple is welcomed into Chicago′s high society, where beautiful people live beautiful lives.But there is a dark side…one that sends Rachel′s life spiraling into a nightmare. It′s clear everyone is guilty of something. But whose secrets will lead to murder?