Send Me A Lover (41 page)

I’m still smiling, sliding my ring up and down my thumb. ‘You’re making me nervous,’ I tell him.

‘I have that effect on people,’ he says, and then there’s a very awkward pause.

‘Well the reason for my call, in case you are wondering—which I reckon you probably are… is that I’ve found this fabulous little street vendor at the Pike Street Market who makes a mean gyros, and I was wondering if you’d like to come down here and have one with me some time.’

‘A gyros. Hang on…’ I fidget, moving the newspaper around with my feet as it sits on my rug. You want me to come all the way to Seattle for a gyros?’

‘Not just any gyros. A bloody big, honking, fantastic pork one, to be precise. With lots of shredded lettuce, thin disks of ripe tomato, and tzatziki. Lots of tzatziki slathered all over the place. And don’t get me started about the buns.’

‘You’re very persuasive when you get going.’

‘Don’t fall over yourself hurrying to answer,’ he says. ‘The suspense is killing me. How about if I say, there’s absolutely no strings attached. If you want, you can literally come down here, eat and leave. I won’t be offended. I’ll understand what the draw was.’

I can’t seem to form a sentence. I’m just about to try to get my tongue around the word ‘okay’ when something happens. My nervous fiddling with my ring sends it flying right off my thumb. It seems to travel through the air almost in slow motion, and lands with an audible
plik
onto the newspaper at my feet. Right onto the front page of the Lower Mainland section. Onto the picture of a man.

It’s a face I recognise instantly.

‘So what’s it going to be?’ Sean says.

‘Let me think about it,’ I tell him, only half seriously.

But I already think I know.

I take his craggy hand, as we walk out of the basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, into one of the oldest piazzas in Rome. Our last of seven nights here, before we move onto the island of Capri tomorrow.

It’s the end of May, as yet not quite warm in the evenings, but my shiver vanishes when he puts his arm around me and I burrow into the softness of his navy sweatshirt.

The fountain in the centre of the piazza is floodlit and a throng of people sit on its steps. Two giant men on stilts, painted from head to toe in silver, perform daredevil acrobatics to a cheering crowd. From somewhere classical music plays, so full and uplifting it feels like it could raise the sky.

We sit at a pricey patio in the square. The restaurant, Sabatini, brims with smart Romans ordering the standard fare—drawn-out courses of antipasti, followed by overpriced pasta, followed by platters of bright-eyed whole fish twinkling here and there with olive oil and lemon, or hunks of roasted lamb on the bone, propped up by a cluster of potatoes. I read about this place in the guidebooks, then completely forgot about it. Yet by chance we’ve just stumbled upon it, as though we were somehow meant to find it for our last night in this fantastic city. We order two wood oven pizzas, because that’s exactly what we fancy, but we splurge on a good bottle of vino.

The pizza is perfect. The wine, a vibrant Chianti whose name I must write down, makes the meal and the moment thoroughly decadent. I get a rush of in-loveness with Rome, and my life, one of those
I could live here with you forever
moments. He sees it. Across the table, his mellow Harvey’s Bristol Cream eyes twinkle and flare, in response to the tears in my own. I’m too overcome with happiness to speak. He knows this. Even from the very first time we met, this Roger knew things without my having to tell him.

I never went to Seattle. As soon as my ring landed on that photo of him in my newspaper I knew. Roger Krieger, the controversial City planner opposing some garish new development that’s slated to impress the world when the 2010 Winter Olympics is hosted in Whistler, was the man I wanted to see again. I think I always knew from that first disastrous date. Only I wasn’t ready then. I’d gone to bed that night in my new house knowing I was ready to love again, but with a feeling in my bones that Jonathan had somehow let me down, and that was so uncharacteristic of him. The fact that Sean phoned right the next morning felt uncanny. But when I saw Roger’s face on the page of that newspaper, it felt like fate.

I told Sean I wouldn’t be coming to Seattle, that I’d met somebody else. Then I found Roger Krieger’s email address. I said that while I knew he probably wouldn’t want to touch me with a barge pole, after how I’d behaved the last time we went out, I just wanted to write and tell him that I was feeling much better about myself now, and I was sorry how our two attempts at dates had turned out. I wrote that any time he wanted to take me to a movie about a kinky widow who went around peeing in bushes while spying on her neighbours having sex, he had only just to call. Although I added that I didn’t expect he would. I imagined he’d have some other woman in his life by now—it was, after all, not far off a year since I’d last seen him.

I got an out-of-office auto reply. He was out of town on business. The following Tuesday I got a real reply.

I hear they’re making a sequel

Roger.

PS. No other woman, as you asked.

I thought it was a bit short, and I didn’t know what to make of it. But then he rang me that night.

‘I’d rather do pizza again, than the movie,’ he said
.
‘Last time, the waitress felt sorry for me and didn’t make me pay. I got to take your pizza home as leftovers. It made a great lunch. Maybe I might as get lucky again?’

I smiled down the phone. ‘But that assumes I’ll walk out on you again.’

‘Well, won’t you?’ he said quietly.

If he was as great as I had remembered him, I wasn’t going to let him get away twice. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll stick around at least as far as coffee.’

~ * * * ~

‘Can we give everything up and come live here?’ I ask him now. He told me I’d love Rome. He was right.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘if you like.’

‘We can? Why do you always give in to me?’

‘I don’t. I’m humouring you. There’s a difference. Besides, I thought it was England you’re always wanting to move to. Besides, if we lived here, we’d have nowhere special to go on vacation.’ He looks around. ‘What could top this?’

I want to be finished this meal, to walk, hand in hand, through the tiny, meandering streets of Rome, back to our small but charming B&B, back to our bed where he will hold me, and I’ll fall asleep staring out of the window, imagining what we might do tomorrow, and listening to the sound of his breathing.

‘Nothing could top this,’ I tell him.

~ * * * ~

We get off the ferry at Marina Grande, Capri’s small, chaotic port.

We’ve somehow acquired a travelling companion. A rather eccentric British woman wearing a white picture hat, who is turning heads wherever we go.

‘Has NOBODY in this country heard of the word queue?’ she asks, as half the Italian population seem to be pushing on as we are trying to get off. ‘You’d love to turn a hosepipe with some pesticide on them, wouldn’t you? That’d teach them some manners.’ She glares at me. ‘We should have gone to Lake Garda.’

Some might call it an odd form of honeymoon, and they might well be right. But I could only afford three weeks off work as
Write Strategies
has got me quite busy these days, and I couldn’t come all the way to Europe and
not
see her. Then I would have spent three weeks moping, and, as Roger said, that would have been a bit of a passion-killer. We have applied to sponsor her to live in Canada, but it could take a long time. So it was actually my husband’s idea that we invite her along for our third week: that’s the kind of man he is.

‘Sophia Loren lives here somewhere,’ she tells us, smiling as we cram into the funicular that lifts us high up through the fragrant lemon groves whose branches graze the side of the carriage. Up and up over the massive azure expanse of the Mediterranean, taking us to the island’s centre. Her aging hand, with its ever-pink perfect nails clutches onto the central pole to steady her, her head turning with wonder and curiosity at the glittering view that quickly drops away from us. Roger has his hand around my waist; I feel his thumb rub my bare tummy where my T-shirt doesn’t quite meet my skirt. I eventually got my curves back. And my big boobs. I’m a lot like the old me again.

‘We’ll go looking for her,’ he says to my mam.

‘Will we?’ Her eyes linger on him fondly. My mother loves Roger. ‘I’m not sure she’s worthy of our efforts, are you? She should come looking for us.’ She does that enigmatic posing thing and casts her glance far out of the window; that look that tells me she’s more of a star than Sophia ever could be.

Our hotel—Da Fiore—is charm’s own self. A private, white, flat-roofed home down a narrow, twisting, bougainvillea-bedecked residential street, perched in a lofty position above this decadently beautiful island—the twinkling Med with abundant orange and lemon trees drooping over the walls of its small garden, spilling floral fragrance into the air. Da Fiore has a handful of rooms it opens to tourists who have come to enjoy a non-touristy experience of this moneyed island. More importantly, people who want to enjoy its gastronomic flavours, as prepared by Da Fiore’s self-styled but quite celebrated chef, Guiseppe, who runs the place, along with his son and daughter-in-law. Roger’s sister came here several years ago and fell in love with it. A week here was her wedding present to us, which was generous, because it’s pretty extortionate.

Gracious Ospitality
reads the handwritten sign at the door.

The three of us smile.

‘Ow Ospitable of them,’ my mother says, and cackles.

~ * * * ~

Giuseppe, presumably—the man himself—is sitting reading a book on a patio chair in a small, shady vestibule as we come in. He instantly claps his book closed, and stands up, and I see it’s an Italian translation of a Danielle Steel novel, and I instantly start to wonder about the place where we have come to stay.

‘Welcome!’ he enthuses, in that way I’ve quickly come to know is sincerely Italian. His gaze falls away from us, and plasters itself all over my mother.

‘We’re the honeymooners,’ Roger reminds him, right after my husband has taken out a small comb and ran it through his hair: his very weird habit. ‘Krieger. You have your best room for us.’ That’s my husband’s sneaky way of ensuring he gets what he wants. He sets it up so people can’t exactly refuse him. Like when he proposed.

We’d gone for bacon and eggs one Sunday morning at Sophie’s Cosmic Café in my neighbourhood. After the waitress had refilled our coffee, he asked her if she would ask me if I would marry him.

‘Which of the two beautiful ladies is your wife?’ asks Giuseppe.

Argh. It’s going to be another one of these is it?

‘Less of that dirty grin,’ I elbow my mam. Two months ago, my mother went to visit Georgios. She still claims he’s not The One, but until The One comes along, Georgios has obviously got something going for him. I, personally, am hoping that she’s eventually going to see sense.

Wearing a navy and white checked apron around a stomach that’s burgeoning somewhere between well-fed and portly, our robust and not un-handsome host with the Karma Sutra eyes, flicks through a reservations book, gives up, searches in the chaos of a desk drawer until he pulls out a wrinkled, and not very clean-looking, piece of paper.

‘
Allora
… The reservation was for one room,’ he tells us, in adequate English, looking right at Roger. ‘See this here,’ he holds out the piece of paper on which somebody has scrawled our last name Krieger and some dates and numbers that could mean anything you wanted them to be really.

‘One room?’ I repeat, before Roger can even reply. ‘There’s obviously been a mistake.’

‘There is no mistake,
signora,
’ his attention shifts to me. ‘One room, and all our other rooms are full. So is take or leave. Is up to you.’

‘Come on, it’s our honeymoon!’ my husband says. ‘You must have two rooms.’

Giuseppe taps his pen rhythmically on the counter top, looking like he’s thinking. ‘No,’ he finally says. ‘What we ‘ave is a small problem. No?’