Other People We Married (17 page)

Hotels were always the best. They made Laura feel like she could be anyone, he could be anyone, they could be in love. Other people had used those beds for the same reason, she knew. They’d been to a resort in the Catskills, a motel by the beach in Montauk, an inn in San Francisco. Rome was the farthest a field. Stephen knew better than to try it at her place.

The travel editor at the magazine had typed up a list of restaurants; romantic spots where one could eat al fresco and drink grappa beneath the swaying branches of a tree incongruously growing out of a patch of cobblestones. Stephen had stapled the list to the inside cover of one of their city guides, folding it up like a passed note in geometry class. This one had been on the top of the list, both on the page and in the book itself. The reviews mentioned marriage proposals and homemade gnocchi. Laura was hoping for the latter. They were shown to a table in the corner of the patio, which was illuminated almost entirely by a trio of votive candles floating in a small dish of water.

“Seems a little churchy, doesn’t it?” Stephen gestured toward the tiny flames between them. “Do you think people spontaneously burst into ‘Ave Maria’ during the cheese course?”

“I think it’s all the cheese course, Stephen. We’re in Italy.”

He raised a finger. “You may be right.”

The table was wide between them, an expanse of wood the size of a door, which it might have been in a previous incarnation. A waiter appeared beside them, followed swiftly by a bottle of red wine.

Stephen slid his knife and fork out of his way, and pushed the tip of his pointer finger into the neighborhood of the candles’ light. His hair looked darker than usual, less boyish. He would be forty soon, and although they hadn’t talked about it, Laura knew what came after thirty-nine.

“Listen, Laura,” he started. “Look.”

She looked. Stephen drew back his finger, as though he thought wax might have jumped onto his skin from below, as though a burn might have appeared.

“Listen.” Was she supposed to look, or listen? Laura thought about her eyes and ears taking smoke breaks while the others worked. The ears would suntan, the eyes would nap. They’d all sit around the pool and flirt. Stephen began to stutter a bit. “I’m sorry about what happened today. At the house. I mean, I’m sorry about what I said. I know it’s hard for you, when you’re thinking about John, I mean. I don’t want to disrespect that. I hope you know that. You know that, right?”

Stephen had said John’s name a total of four times, ever. Each time it came out of his mouth, Laura felt like she’d been caught shoplifting. This was number five. Laura began to respond, but Stephen raised his hand a few inches off the table. He wasn’t finished. Laura felt her chin turn slightly to one side, like a dog that heard a high-pitched noise and might have to run.

“I want you to know that, because it’s true. But I also need
you to understand that I only paid for two of us to come on this vacation.”

Laura sucked her lips into her mouth.

“I don’t want to upset you, really, I don’t.”

Laura nodded, sucked harder. A waiter appeared and Stephen shooed him away.

“It’s just that we talked about this. This trip, I mean. And I thought everything was going to be okay, that you were fine.”

“I am fine.” Her eyes shone. She wanted it to be true, to prove him wrong.

Laura reached down beside her chair and put her shopping bag on her lap. The bag lived in a bag of its own, a soft cotton meant to protect it from the outside world, from anything that could hurt it. Laura’s hands felt too large for her body, too masculine to own such an object. Surely she was doing something wrong. Stephen brought his fist to his mouth, as though he was about to chew on his knuckle.

There was enough crinkly tissue paper in the shopping bag to fill out the leather one, and Laura busily stuffed everything inside, and hooked the full bag over her shoulder. She smiled at Stephen, offering her teeth as a sign that all was well with the world. If something was wrong, he’d have to get past those teeth to find it.

It was three bottles later when they made it back to the hotel. The cockeyed desk clerk rose from behind the concierge to let them in—the door was locked after midnight, and it was almost two. After shuffling noisily to the door, the clerk made a big show of removing a medieval-looking key from his belt. He lowered the key into place, releasing unseen levers and
pulleys, and slowly swung the door open. Laura clutched her bag in front of her chest, beaming with her purple mouth. “Bwhoa-nah no-tay,” she said, repeating something she had heard that sounded about right.

“Close door,” he reminded them as they ducked into the elevator, already starting to paw at each other’s clothes. “If no, I climb…” He mimed walking up the five flights of stairs to their room. “No good.” His bad eye went toward the ceiling, as if already seeing what was to come.

When the elevator reached the fifth floor, Stephen led Laura into their room backward, somehow unlocking the door without even looking behind him. Laura wondered if he’d been practicing that, too, the way kids practice kissing on their hands, on their pillows, eyes closed and concentrating. She stumbled over something and then realized it was her new bag, which she had unceremoniously dropped, forgetting what it was, and how much it cost. She screamed a little, but her mouth was directly on Stephen’s, and the sound just went somewhere inside him, down into his lungs where it would turn around and come back as something else, something nicer, a happy moan.

They fell onto the bed: first Stephen, then Laura. His belt buckle clanged onto the floor, his pants weighed down by pockets full of ticket stubs and receipts. Her skirt was a deflated inner tube around her waist, trying to keep her afloat.

“Hey,” Stephen said into her bare stomach. “I was thinking.”

“Bad idea. Really bad idea.” Laura rolled him over and straddled his torso with her legs. She let her hair swing down into his face, waves crashing against the rocky shore.

*  *  *

The phone rang, and Laura picked it up without even realizing it. It was almost five, she saw, and she was almost entirely still asleep.

“If you no close door, nothing move. Yes?”

Laura tried to understand. There were glimpses of something that made sense, pieces the dark room couldn’t quite help her connect. She didn’t close the door. She didn’t close the door. Ah! It came to her all at once, the bad eye looking upward, the backward walk from the elevator. They hadn’t shut the door to the cabin, and the elevator was stuck on their floor. No doubt someone was trying to rush to the airport, ringing insistently for the elevator, and finally, in a flush of anger, they’d called the front desk.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, mumbling. “I’ll close it right now. So sorry.”

Laura let her feet hit the floor one by one, testing the water. The room was cold—they’d left the window open, and all of her clothing was still on the floor where it had dropped. Laura hunched her shoulders and balled her fists, hurrying to the hallway, her joints creaky and heavy with sleep. The one room opposite her own was quiet, with no light peeking out from under the door. They were asleep, her neighbors. She wondered if they were American, too, if the desk clerk had scolded them as well, or if she were the only one who looked unhinged enough to do something so selfish, so wrong. She shut the elevator door and heard it immediately whir into motion, dropping down to rescue someone below. She stayed in the hallway for a moment, her body covered with goose bumps, and listened to the sounds of things progressing as they
should. Someone needed to go home, someone needed a ride. She was in their way, and she hadn’t even noticed.

Across the piazza, the Pantheon was gray and massive, a monument to hope. Laura looked back toward the bed, where Stephen had strewn himself across the bed like their clothes were thrown across the floor, at strange angles, as though he was taking up as much space as possible. The pale top sheet curled around his thighs, disappearing behind him. Laura lifted the blanket off the floor, where it had landed, and curled her body against his, finding there to be enough space, after all. She covered them both with the thin down quilt and put her face back against the pillow.

Some six months before the trip, Laura and Stephen decided together that they would stop seeing Rose. Her interest in them had changed; they both felt it. And they were tired of starting most of their sentences, “Well, Rose said…” or “As I said to Rose…” Laura often thought that her own sessions with Rose were now at least partially devoted to applauding Rose’s own wisdom to set them up, the possibilities that she had had the foresight to understand. Now they just wondered to themselves about what had gone wrong. Though she wouldn’t admit it to Stephen, Laura felt that this was fundamentally unfair. Losing people so often happened naturally; why force it? Jane the blond and good had believed in exercise, and Stephen had started to run. He thought maybe she should give it a try.

The Borghese wasn’t terribly far, but Stephen called a taxi. He’d bought tickets online, for ten in the morning, and he
didn’t want to be late. Up on the hill, the city looked more like New York’s West Village—tidy little buildings with elaborate sconces and handsome flora in the window boxes. Looking at Stephen next to her in the backseat, Laura wondered what his vacation was like, if he was having a good time. She thought he probably was. Maybe she was having a good time, too, and just hadn’t noticed. That seemed like a nice possibility. Did Stephen think about Jane the blond and good as much as she thought about John? There was no way to tell. He didn’t describe her as “blond and good,” but it was what Laura understood. She knew that if the four of them had all been in a room together, breaking the laws of time and space, the original pairings would have prevailed. That was unequivocally true, but it wasn’t polite to bring it up. If they were somewhere else, somewhere she’d never been, somewhere where her marriage had never existed, that would have been better. Then she wouldn’t be checking for consistency.

Stephen noticed her looking at him and stretched his palm across the seat, open. Laura tucked her hand inside his and let him squeeze. He liked this, feeling like she was going to him, like he had drawn her out. Outside, the leaves in the park rustled noisily—it was high fall, even in Rome, where Laura had believed it always to be summer. Red, orange, yellow—that only happened in New England, she thought, and for about five minutes outside her front door in Brooklyn. Like most things, fall in Rome was more grand, more beautiful. It made her want to stay. New York never felt like this for longer than a few days. It was as though transition—the idea of transition—had set up camp long enough for everyone to get used to what was to come.

The Borghese had been a palazzo before it became a museum, and it was one of those places, like the Frick in New York, where you immediately wanted to send for your belongings and throw dinner parties and balls for all your friends. As a teenager, Laura liked to go to the Frick and debate with herself over the merits of the various wallpapers, which rooms she would use for her personal chambers, which she would still agree, generously, to share with the public. Most of the time, she would decide the public had enjoyed the house enough, and that it was all for her, thank you very much. John preferred the Guggenheim and had been appalled at her selfishness. He thought public spaces were to be shared. Yes, Laura, explained to him, that’s why it wouldn’t be a public space anymore, because I would live there. We could have sixteen cats and a maid and even a suite for your mother, don’t you think she’d like that? We could have a chef who only made what we liked to eat, bagels and lox every morning, or blueberry pancakes, whatever we wanted! John would shake his head no; she wasn’t serious. Laura had always hated that about him, his unwillingness to indulge.

The house had pillars and curving staircases and reclining nudes at every turn. The ceilings of the first floor had to be at least twenty feet high—even Stephen was dwarfed by the room’s stature. Several tour groups swarmed around them—this one following a woman holding aloft a French flag; this one following a smiley face on a stick. People, fifteen at a time, huddled close around a statue, looking to their leader to decipher the mysteries held within. Laura and Stephen decided to wander aimlessly from one room to the next, stopping here and there to hear what a German docent
might say about a particular piece. Neither of them spoke German, but with a pale, luminous David holding up the dripping head of Goliath, and all those guttural sounds, there was little doubt what was being described. Stephen ducked and pulled Laura into the next room, both of them colliding with protruding fanny packs and elbows the length of the museum.

Laura reached the subsequent room a little out of breath. She was laughing at Stephen, who was in the midst of an impression of a tourist listening raptly to what was being said, staring at the explanatory paper in front of him, and paying no attention at all to the sculpture behind him.

Over his head, there were leaves, marble leaves. When his own attentive audience had stopped listening, Stephen turned to join Laura in looking at what had been behind him, only partially obscured, as it too towered over his head.

Laura followed the leaves down to where they turned into fingers. They turned into strands of hair, long and wavy, like her own. A woman rose out of the earth, still in motion, tree bark beginning to form around her slender, marble legs. Her toes had roots. Behind her, a man was running, so close he had one hand already on her waist, where her skin was covered with marble wood. He was moving quickly, trying so hard to catch her that the fabric he’d been wearing, a sheet, a cloak, had fallen to his waist and was whipping behind him, forever in motion, the soft ends ticked up with an unseen wind. Gray ribbons of regret ran throughout his straining legs, through the leaves, and into her side.

“What is this?” Laura asked, not to Stephen, but to anyone.

“Apollo and Daphne,” Stephen said. He stood in front of
the explanatory placard, his shoulders bent forward to read the small print. “Bernini, 1625. He was only twenty-four.”