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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?”
