TEN
When I woke the next morning, the sun was streaming through the window and I could hear birds chirping in the tree outside. If I were in a Disney movie, a couple of mice might have stopped by to help me pull an outfit together. But alas, this was my life, so I untwisted my nightgown from around my waist, rubbed my sleep-crusted eyes, and thought, Why would Adam choose nothing over me?
Had I really been so intolerable? However humiliated and horrible I may have felt, I had been a good wife. I had always supported Adam and his ambitions, and had accepted him wholeheartedly for who he was, never pushing him to be or do what he could not.
I’m done planning, I heard him say. Well, yes, I had made plans—doing so was integral to my sense of control, which I had been trying to gain since my uncontrollable childhood. Adam had been the one to point this out to me back when we were dating, and he had praised me for it because he was a planner, too. The man had three calendars—two electronic versions and a paper daybook because he was paranoid the e-versions would fail him—as well as a running mental outline of how his life was to unfold.
Up until earlier that year, it had all been on schedule.
It wasn’t as though he could claim he wanted fewer responsibilities. I paid our bills, made sure the fridge and cupboards were well stocked, and maintained communication with everyone in our lives, save Adam’s clients and employees, so that he wouldn’t have to unless he wanted to. I even had our car tires rotated and changed the furnace filter, for cripes’ sake.
Now I was being punished for having made his life easier?
A knock at the door broke through my thoughts. Just outside my room, my breakfast had been delivered on a cart. I wheeled it inside, expecting little, but when I removed the silver lid covering the tray, a small feast awaited me.
The frothy cappuccino was almost as good as the one I’d had the afternoon before. I took a few sips and then topped a triangle of toast with hazelnut spread and ate every last crumb before moving on to a tiny cup of yogurt. The yogurt was thick and tasted just ever so slightly like honey. I ate a soft-boiled egg perched in a yellow porcelain eggcup, even though it pained me to crack its speckled shell with my spoon. I unwrapped a piece of chocolate (chocolate at breakfast—bless this place!) and washed it down with the rest of my coffee. After having spent months approaching food as a duty, my appetite had finally resurfaced. It had to be a sign that I was returning to myself.
I had thought Italy would be a chance to escape my troubles. By my second day, it became evident they were still trailing behind me. When a thin, dark-haired tourist strode past me in the gardens at Vatican City, I found myself wondering if Jillian Smith had any idea she had been co-opted in Adam’s elaborate lie. Or maybe she had left him, I mused, pausing beside a manicured hedge to watch the woman walk away. He had said Jillian had wanted to sleep with him—but that wasn’t necessarily the same as wanting to break up his marriage. Maybe she was married, too, but was a compassionate cheater who didn’t chop down her family tree just because she wanted to stick her feathers in a new nest for a while. I didn’t know why I cared—she and he and they were all a thing of the past—but it seemed that maybe Jillian Smith would know what had driven Adam to this point.
I spent the afternoon on the ancient-ruins walking tour, thinking more of the same. Our last stop on the tour was Torre Argentina, the Roman cat sanctuary where cats lazed about in the spot where Julius Caesar had gasped his last breath. A couple that had been canoodling every step of the way was necking against a wall with a large placard that said “Do Not Touch” in five different languages, and I was so busy trying not to think about when Adam and I had last made out like that in public—I wasn’t sure, but it was sometime during the previous millennium—that I missed the first half of the guide’s story of Caesar’s fateful betrayal. Of course, I already knew a thing or two about fateful endings (et tu, husband?).
When I got back to my hotel that night, I emailed Jean to see if she wanted to get together the following day, with the hope that having an actual person to talk to would yank me from my mental sludge (the two and a half glasses of wine I’d had at dinner, however inexpensive and delicious, had been ineffective in that department).
Jean was game, and so we agreed to meet for lunch at a restaurant run by one of the city’s renowned Pizzaioli, or pizza makers. I had never been a big fan of pizza, which was sacrilege to a Chicagoan like Adam, but Jean had already been to the restaurant and said the meal I was about to eat would forever change the way I felt about the dish. And when I bit into a slice with a crisp, thin crust, a rich and almost floral tomato sauce, and dots of creamy mozzarella, I was indeed a changed woman.
Now we were staring up at Trajan’s Column, the stone monument that had been built to commemorate Emperor Trajan’s victory in the Dacian War.
“It’s amazing that a flourishing modern city rose around ancient ruins,” I mused to Jean.
“Isn’t it just the darnedest thing?” she said. The column towered over a hundred feet, and every inch of it had been intricately carved with men and women fighting, working, and seducing each other. “That level of detail must have taken years to create! To think I get antsy if a painting takes more than a few weeks.”
“That’s the human condition,” I said, moving out of the column’s shadow to warm myself in the afternoon sun.
“Or maybe I’m just impatient,” said Jean as she nudged me in the side.
I laughed. “Touché.”
Trajan’s Column was nestled in ruins near the center of the city, and after walking around the area for a while, we headed west to the Tiber River. “How are you holding up, Maggie?” Jean asked when we had reached one of the arched bridges over the river. Like many other things in the city, the bridge was at once deteriorating and spectacular. “Managing to enjoy yourself in spite of what’s on the other side of the Atlantic?”
I ran my fingers along the bridge’s stone rail. Below us, the Tiber’s taupe water rushed wildly. “Oh, you know.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it, my friend,” said Jean.
“I just keep wishing Adam had never told me the truth about Jillian. Now it’s like he and his fake lover are haunting my vacation.”
Jean nodded. “I’m not the type to say everything happens for a reason. Oftentimes that’s just plain nonsense.” She had a faraway look on her face and didn’t speak again for a few minutes. “Sam and I—we had a daughter named Norah. She died of leukemia when she was three,” she finally said.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Jean, I’m so sorry.”
“Me too. Sometimes I wonder if her death was what broke Sam’s heart in the first place. We went on to have two more children.” She fished her phone out of her purse and found a picture. “This is Sammy, our son,” she said, pointing to a tall man with Jean’s eyes. “And this is Hannah, our other daughter,” she said, pointing to a petite Asian woman. “We adopted her when Sammy was eight because Sam and I couldn’t manage to have a third child ourselves. Love ’em both like crazy, but I pray there’s an afterlife so I can see Norah again. Anyway,” she said, shaking her head as she slipped her phone back in her bag, “her passing is why I don’t believe in that whole ‘everything for a reason’ line.”
I was about to respond when Jean bent to pick up a euro someone had dropped on the bridge. She stood, rubbed the two-toned coin between her fingers, and chucked it into the Tiber. “But if there’s one thing I do believe in, it’s wiping the crap off your shoes and finding a fresh patch of grass to stand on. Let’s get moving.”
I would have to have a word with Barbara of Bridgewater Travel. She had been right: I was enjoying traveling on my own. I had already been living alone for the better part of a year, but vacationing by myself was something else entirely. It was freeing to decide what I wanted to see, when I wanted to eat, and if I had simply had enough of any given outing or experience without asking for another person’s input.
But Barbara had failed to inform me that there would be loved-up couples at every turn, reminding me that my vacation was far from the romantic one I had originally planned.
The food tour I had signed up for was no exception. As we introduced ourselves at the tree-canopied public park where we were meeting, I discovered there were five pairs—and once again, markedly solo me. As I sat on the end of a park bench, waiting for our tour to officially commence, I felt like a teen who had been waiting too long to be asked to dance.
The tour guide, Benito, was a genial Italian man in his forties. He had beautiful black curls and wore a crisp blue shirt that fit impeccably, even at his stomach, which was the only part of his body that wasn’t trim. He had grown up in Rome but attended college in New York, he told us in melodically accented English before turning to me and winking.
A wink? I was aghast. A younger man, and an attractive one at that, just winked at me? Maybe a wink didn’t mean the same thing in Italian. I ordered myself to focus on food.
Testaccio, said Benito as we began to walk, had been a bustling trade center for meat, olive oil, and other foods for centuries. It was the culinary epicenter of the city, and since Rome was nothing if not its food, “some, myself included, would say this neighborhood is the authentic heart of Rome,” he told us.
“This is Mount Testaccio,” said Benito as we approached a hill. “Not much of a mountain, but surely a miracle: it is built on clay pots that held olive oil centuries ago.”
As we drew closer, I saw that the hill’s shrubs and greenery grew on thin dirt that was atop stacks of broken pieces of clay. “Olive oil makes anything porous rancid after a while, so the citizens could not reuse their amphorae, or clay jars. Instead, they were discarded here,” said Benito, and if I wasn’t mistaken, he was smiling right at me. “But as you can see, this garbage heap is not haphazard at all. The jars were arranged carefully and topped with a limestone mix that keeps them from crumbling. From the wreckage, a landmark was born.”
I smiled back at Benito. I was a heap of wreckage myself. What did I have to lose by engaging in a little harmless flirting, if that was indeed what was happening?
Our first stop on the tour was a salumeria where cured meat, cheese, olive oil, and truffle products were sold. “If you have ever had truffle salt or truffle oil, what you’ve had was not the fungi at all, but an organic compound with an aroma similar to the truffle. This,” said Benito with pride, passing out thin crackers topped with a fluffy white cheese that contained small gray bits, “is what truffle really tastes like.”
I actually moaned as the cheese melted on my tongue. Benito laughed and sidled up to me. “Good, good! That is the intended reaction,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “I always hope for one true food lover on each tour, but I am rarely so lucky as I am today.”
The playful gleam in his eye said he was definitely flirting, but it had been so long since anyone had flirted with me that I wasn’t sure what to do about that. Italian men were legendary for their womanizing ways, I reminded myself, even as my cheeks reddened because no amount of rationalizing could dull the pleasure of being noticed.
After the truffles, Benito served us several cuts of meat that the owner of the salumeria had chosen for us: prosciutto, coppa, and a savory rustic sausage called cacciatorini. “Remember, we have several more stops, so go slow and loosen your belts,” Benito cautioned.
Our pack headed to the Mercato Testaccio, a bustling food market composed of stalls beneath a metal-framed structure. The market itself was only a few years old, but many of the families manning the stalls were fourth-, fifth-, and even sixth-generation carryovers from the previous market that had once stood in the same place. There, we visited a cheesemonger who rose at three each morning to make mozzarella from scratch, and snacked on bruschetta, whose oil-drizzled tomatoes, basil, and crusty bread had all come from the vendors. Then we washed it down with small glasses of garnet-hued Montepulciano.
Yes, absolutely, please, thank you, I said to every single thing that was offered to me, including the wine, even though I was growing uncomfortably full. Each sip and bite seemed to signify that for as much as Adam had taken from me, he had not managed to sap all the pleasure from my life.
After the market, we moved on to a trattoria that specialized in classic Roman fritti: fried artichokes, fried peppers and eggplant, and my favorite, fried squash blossoms. Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly eat another thing, Benito told us it was time for a late lunch. We headed to a restaurant that had been built into the side of Mount Testaccio. The aerated clay provided its own heating and cooling system, which kept the restaurant temperate all year round, Benito said.
We were seated at a long table at the rear of the restaurant, near a glass wall that showcased the cracked clay mountainside that made up the back of the building. “This is cacio e pepe,” said Benito as a waiter placed before us platters of pale yellow pasta tubes speckled with black pepper. “Take a bite,” he instructed after we had served ourselves. “What do you think the sauce is made of?” He smiled devilishly, and I felt my lips turn upward, too.
“Eggs?” asked one-half of a newlywed couple, and Benito shook his head.
“A bit of cream?” ventured a young British woman.
“That’s precisely what it tastes like, but true cacio e pepe is made only with pecorino cheese and black pepper,” he said, catching my eye. “The chef adds a bit of the water used to boil the pasta to mix it just before it’s served, and that gives it its creamy texture.”
Benito paired our pasta with a local Italian wine called cesanese, which he described as having hints of mulberry, juniper, and a forest floor. To me, it tasted like being an ocean away from my troubles. When he offered seconds, I held out my glass.
“Have you enjoyed yourself?” asked Benito. We had just wrapped up our last stop, for espresso at a bustling café, and the group had begun to scatter.
I put my hand on my stomach, which was threatening to break the zipper of my pants. “Maybe a bit too much.”
Benito gave me a wide, almost wolfish grin. “Then I have done my job. I assume you won’t want to eat tonight, but—” He slipped his hand into the front pocket of his shirt and retrieved a business card, which he handed to me. “If you are interested in joining me for a cocktail or a glass of wine, I would be pleased to show you more of Rome.”
This sent a shiver of satisfaction through me. An attractive, interesting man had not only seen me, he had decided he wanted to see more. Of course, I had been alive long enough to know that his interest in me made him even more appealing than he would have been otherwise. But it didn’t matter. Being attracted to someone other than Adam felt like a revelation. Maybe it was not the autumn of my romantic life. Maybe there was some spring left in me after all.
But what if he was crawling with crabs, or a psychopath—or married? My eyes traveled from his face to his left hand. I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but I had heard that many Europeans didn’t wear them.
My visual inquiry did not escape Benito. “I am not married,” he said pleasantly. “I am a man who would be happy for the company of a beautiful woman and fellow food lover. But”—he bowed his head slightly, which made me laugh—“there is no pressure. Only an offer.”
I felt a small flutter. Maybe Benito could be a new adventure on my Roman vacation. After all, what did I have left to lose?
Nothing. Not a damn thing.
“Yes,” I said to Benito, whose face lit up at my response. “I would like to have a drink with you.” Possibly two, I thought as I accepted his outstretched arm. A date with Benito sounded like just the thing to help me forget about Adam—and find out if the signs of life stirring within me meant I was ready to make contact.