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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?”
