скачать книгу бесплатно
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.”
