Laura and Stephen were set up by their therapist. It was after they’d both quit going to their bereavement support groups, and didn’t seem any weirder than being set up by your divorce lawyer, which had happened to a couple of Laura’s girlfriends. Rose suggested they meet at a Starbucks, somewhere public, where hostility and anger weren’t allowed. Laura picked the one closest to her job at the magazine; she often saw blind dates take place there, nervous conversations with too much talk about the exes. It was the working girl’s way of multi-tasking; screening potential suitors on their lunch breaks. She picked an empty table with a view of the street, and kept her sunglasses on so that she could scrutinize all the single men with impunity. Three were bald, which would have been fine. One had glasses and a weedy frame; surely that was him; she’d described John to Rose. Would she send her a replacement husband, as though John had been an ill-fitting sweater, finally swapped for the correct size?
One guy looked like a quarterback and began wandering around in between the tables after buying his venti latte. She watched him circle the other tables of single women, who stayed focused on their laptops. He was tall, over six feet, and looked like the kind of boy who’d had lots of girlfriends in high school. He had probably been on the lacrosse team, or soccer, something sun-kissed and surrounded by cheering fans. It had never rained where he grew up, she just knew it. Laura slid her sunglasses to the top of her head.
“Stephen?” she said, sure that she would be speaking into thin air, that the quarterback would shake his head and probably laugh when he got outside. Laura wasn’t unattractive, she knew, but hers was a subtler kind: unplucked eyebrows and sensible footwear.
He looked startled, like a baby next to a popped balloon just before the tears started to flow. But then the momentary look of panic was gone, so absent, in fact, that Laura was sure she’d imagined it. “Laura?” he said. Stephen was already smiling when he slid into the seat across from her, as easily as if she and everyone else at the Starbucks had somehow wandered into his living room.
“Looks that way,” Laura said. Her hair felt even more brown that usual, like mouse-fur or dry dirt. “Hi.” At least it was long again. After John died, she’d chopped all her hair off, up to her ears. Her mother said she looked like Joan of Arc, who Laura thought probably didn’t have a mirror. It had not been a compliment.
“Nice to meet you,” Stephen said. His teeth were beautiful products of adolescent orthodontia: straight and well spaced. Rose hadn’t mentioned the teeth. In fact, Rose hadn’t mentioned anything, other than that Stephen too had lost his wife, and was chafing at the uniformity of the (aged, female) participants of the bereavement group he’d been attending. She definitely hadn’t mentioned his shoulders, or his lion’s mane, which crested and cooed at Laura as though it had a voice all its own, each blond curl telling her why this couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t work.
Part Two
Laura had been to Rome before, some ten years previous, with John. They hadn’t yet married, but the trip, in the honeymoon of their relationship, was overflowing with the kind of romance that nauseates fellow travelers with all its public kisses and fondling. But that was a long time ago, and Laura felt almost certain she was ready to go back. After all, Rome been around for centuries and centuries without her, and without John, and surely it wouldn’t bear the mark of his loss. She would have to do that alone, and hope that Rome didn’t recognize the scar and offer her damp, sorry weather in return. If she wasn’t ready now, then she might never be, and better to try than to stay home with the cat.
After pushing for a Roman holiday for several months, Stephen was excited, and booked a room in a boutique hotel on the Piazza in front of the Pantheon. It was a small building, only five stories high, with two hotel rooms per floor. They were on the very top. Outside their window, the dome of the Pantheon arched gracefully into the sky, until the roof itself opened up, as though the two couldn’t stand to be apart a moment longer. The hotel was expensive, more than five hundred dollars a night, but Stephen paid happily. He’d been rich his whole life, and found the idea of money rather embarrassing. In truth, the room probably cost even more than he had admitted.
The hotel clerk had one good eye, one bad. The one on the left looked at them, and the one on the right examined the crown molding. He explained to them the concept of the elevator. They tried to catch the good eye and nod, letting him know they understood.
“The door — the door, yes?” He pointed, jabbing a short finger in the direction of the elevator shaft. Laura and Stephen nodded in unison. “The door close, or elevator no move. Door close. Must close!” He wagged the finger again, for emphasis. “Must close!” The good eye narrowed; he doubted them already. His finger looked like an Italian sausage, full of red bloody specks. He must have been in his mid-seventies; Laura wondered what he was doing there. Even if he owned the hotel, surely there was a son, a grandson, someone who could do this for him. The good eye found her staring, and forced her into retreat. Laura shuffled with her bags into the small cabin of the elevator, repeating what he had said. “We’ll close the door, we’ll close it, I promise,” she said. Stephen ducked in just before the door began to shut.
After showering off the remains of the recycled air of the airplane, they decided a walk was in order. It was a Saturday, and sunny if not warm, a perfect day to explore a new city. Stephen, for all of his traveling, had never made it to Rome, an oversight he’d spent the last three months planning to correct. He was armed with books and lists and maps and tickets to the Borghese. His digital camera was brand new and could hold five hundred photos.
“Do you want some coffee? Some cappuccino? I hear it’s good here,” he said. Stephen put his hand around her waist and tugged her closer to him. Laura’s hair pulled slightly under his grip. “Whaddya say? You hungry?”
Laura shrugged. There was a cool breeze coming through the street, bouncing off the stone walls. She didn’t remember there being so much stone. “I could have some cappuccino. Why not, right? It’s still morning, isn’t it?”
“If not here, then somewhere.” He kissed the top of her head, sending her chin into his shoulder with a clunk. Stephen looked ahead, beaming, while Laura detangled herself and gave her face a rub.
It was in fact already noon, and by the time they’d been walking for half an hour, the smell of lunch was too seductive to ignore, pouring heavily out of doors and windows. According to the guidebooks, lunch could be a three-course meal, even for real Italians. Laura’s stomach began to growl; she could hear it over the din of the mopeds and the buses and the tourists.
“Let me see the book, what are we close to?” she said.
Stephen dutifully dug one of the guidebooks out of his coat pocket and handed it over.
“Do those look like tortoises? On that fountain? I think we’re here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map. “What does that mean in terms of my stomach?” Laura flipped the page. Stephen leaned in and looked over her shoulder. On the fountain behind them, enormous stone turtles — tortoises, although she wouldn’t have known the difference if the book hadn’t told her — were climbing out of the water basin.
“Ah, I know where we are. Here, right, let’s go, fried artichokes.” Some part of her had known where she was going, the heel of her left foot, maybe, or the tip of her nose. Something remembered.
Stephen spun around on his heels, looking up for street signs. “Right,” he said, “this way.”
“I know it’s that way, I just said so.” Laura shut the book and tucked it in her bag, walking ahead down the narrow sidewalk.
The Jewish Ghetto was something Laura hadn’t expected to find twice in Rome, not by accident. After all, Rome was Catholic, what with the Pope a stone’s throw, and all those churches, churches, churches. But she and John had found it, just like this, tripping along the tiny little streets with unwieldy maps protruding from their bags and blisters growing happily on their toes. It had been summertime, the middle of August, when rates were cheaper and everything seemed so ripe it was bound to spoil. They had been on this street, D’Ottavia, she remembered it now. Looking back, all these little streets had run together, all the piazzas had become one enormous open space, all with olive-skinned teenagers necking like crazy, and them, too — they hadn’t been so much older. They had held hands on every one of these streets, kissed fingers and necks and cheeks across tables at the nicest restaurants they could afford, which weren’t really very nice at all, but they didn’t care. John had always loved to kiss her in public, something that Laura couldn’t imagine anymore, feeling so strongly about the inside of someone else’s mouth that she wouldn’t mind irritating the people around her.
A waiter wearing a white coat showed them to a table. She didn’t remember the restaurant being so fancy. Laura and Stephen both took the folded napkins off their empty plates and put them on their laps, hidden from each other but not from the passers-by. John had always liked sitting in the window, too, like some kind of puppet-show. Look at me accumulate crumbs in my napkin, look at me drop my knife, look at me hold his hand. She and Stephen wouldn’t be holding hands under the table, though. They were past that. It had been nearly a year and a half. It still felt wrong to say boyfriend, which made her feel like a lusty teenager. Thirty-five was too old to have a boyfriend. Some of her unmarried friends had taken to borrowing the homosexual-sounding parlance “partner,” which always made Laura roll her eyes and give a little cough. Sometimes the word ‘ex-husband’ came out of her mouth, and people would roll their eyes, ready to commiserate, they had one too, and she would have to say, No, no, he died, he’s dead. Stephen would lower his eyes and pet her arm, always supportive, but she just wanted to say, Don’t you get that I would still be married? So mostly she just called him her husband, and if people thought she meant Stephen, well, that was fine. His face always colored slightly with the notion.
They ordered the artichokes and the house pasta, cacio e pepe, cheese and pepper. Stephen ordered a bottle of white off of the wine list, and then some veal Milanese, a nice oily start to the afternoon. Stephen preferred French food, and they were always eating something or other provençal. When the artichokes arrived, the neighborhood specialty, a pang of something stronger than hunger hit Laura square in the gut. It was too much, sitting in this room, tasting the same taste, looking out at the same street. She was two-timing herself, covering her discarded artichoke leaves with fresher ones, still crisp from the frying oil — John wouldn’t say that he minded, couldn’t, but she knew, and that was bad enough. If he’d been there, sitting across the street, watching them, he would have picked up a rock and thrown it through the window. He would still be young and impetuous. Laura was glad she didn’t know the Italian word for prostitute. It was probably beautiful, too beautiful for the way she felt. She wondered if Italian whores ate artichokes, or if they had a dish all their own.
“Delicious, huh?” Stephen shoveled a forkful of something creamy into his mouth. He was more handsome than John. She could say that. Next to Stephen, Laura was always aware of where the real beauty was in her relationship. Her friends, sweetly, had tried in vain to stifle their surprise when she’d introduced him.
He was right; it was delicious. Everything Laura put in her mouth tasted like it ought to have been there before. Maybe food was the same as people, and got more attractive the more you were exposed.
“Is this bacon?” Stephen held up a fork — something brown and glistening teetered on the tines.
“I guess so. Does it taste like bacon?”
He popped it in his mouth and chewed. “Tastes like a gift from God.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Stephen looked around. Two other parties sat in the dining room, but no one was at a directly adjacent table. Everyone else was speaking Italian and laughing. “Isn’t this basically a no-no? Bacon? I mean, this place is Jewish, right?”
It was an honest question. “How am I supposed to know? I think being Italian trumps not eating pork products, maybe. I’ll be right back.” Laura dropped her napkin onto her plate and walked around the restaurant until she found the bathroom, where she sat down on the toilet and cried.
Part Three
It had taken months for the details to emerge: Stephen hadn’t actually been married. They — he and Jane, the marathon runner, the blonde, the mourned — hadn’t even been engaged. He told Laura carefully. It had been easier, he explained, to say that they were married. The old ladies in the bereavement group had taken him to task. Not only was he young, only in his late thirties, but he also hadn’t married the girl. What were they supposed to support, his indifference? His unwillingness to commit? Laura didn’t want to admit feeling some of the same resentment, but she knew what it meant. Despite his sadness, which she did not dismiss, Laura knew that Stephen wanted what he’d never had: a wife.
* * *
Tuesday was even cooler weather than they’d expected, only fifty degrees. They walked down the Via del Condotti and watched Japanese tourists lumber under the weight of their shopping bags. The window displays weren’t as elaborate as they were in New York, but Laura didn’t object — it seemed like the Romans didn’t have to do as much convincing. In one window, a leather suitcase the size of an entire cow sat by itself, patiently waiting for someone to buy so much extra clothing that they needed it to carry their belongings home.
In front of them, two women in skintight jeans and high heels stabbed the sidewalk with an aggressive pace. Laura had always thought of herself as a fast walker, but these women, in four-inch heels, put her to shame. Of course, she didn’t know where she was going.
“Want to duck in here, maybe?” Stephen gestured toward an open doorway. The store seemed to be made entirely out of glass and white plastic, like something from the future. Laura wondered if they’d had to tear down whatever gorgeous, ancient building had been there to put this in, but then she noticed that the walls and ceiling were actually still intact, the moldings and the carved putti hovering over the doorway outside, the angels of commerce. It only looked like something new, but really it was the same as all the others.
“Sure, why not. When in Rome, right?” Laura liked this joke when she was at home, and being pressured into doing something, but when the pun came out of her mouth, she felt nauseated, and like she was trying entirely too hard for something she didn’t want in the first place.
“Exactly.” Stephen took her by the elbow and led her into the shop.
An Italian woman roughly Laura’s age approached them, her hands clasped in front of her chest like a nun. Her dark brown hair was wound into an elaborate chignon, so expert it looked professionally done. Shopgirls must make more money here, Laura thought. Commission. No wonder she looks like she’s praying.
But before Laura could even finish thinking about all the money she wouldn’t spend, Stephen recited some Italian phrase. Laura’s neck swiveled quickly, trying to see the words as they left his mouth. Had he been practicing in the bathroom? They had been together for the last three days non-stop. She tried to catalogue all the times he’d been away from her: showers, bathroom time at home and at restaurants, that was it. She could see it, though, the moment she got up in the middle of the night to pee, he’d whip out his phrasebook from under the bed and try furiously to memorize something without saying it aloud.
The salesgirl nodded, and beckoned for them to follow. The store was full of clothing, leather goods, shoes. What had he asked for? Laura had heard of the designer, everyone had — come to think of it, Laura had first read about them on the pages of the magazine in a piece she’d edited, something about ‘the new luxury.’ In a brief, horrifying flash, a four-digit number appeared in her mind’s eye. She began to sweat a little.
The woman showed them to a wall of purses, although it seemed a shame to call them that, like something one’s mother would bring on the cross-town bus. These were something else entirely, a class of handbag Laura had never encountered up close. Stephen pointed to one, an oversized shoulder bag with shiny buckles where the straps connected to the body. The woman took it off the shelf — it had lived in its own cubicle, practically the size of her apartment, Laura thought — and placed it on a glass case in front of them. Despite herself, Laura reached out to touch it. It was buttery soft, the color of creamy cappuccino. She ran her hand along the length of it, sliding her fingers over the polished buckles. She and John had spent days wandering the streets of Rome without ever going into a store like this. They’d sat on park benches and played in the grass like children. The larger part of Laura’s brain knew what something like this would do to her, and to Stephen, what it would mean.
“You like it?” Stephen looked at her expectantly. He’d been practicing. He knew what to ask for, what this thing in front of her was called. He knew its name.
“It’s astounding, actually, but I really can’t let you buy this for me.” The leather felt cherished, something you would keep forever, and then your children would fight over it. She wanted it. She would never use it, just keep it in its bag, surrounded by tissue paper, or no, she would use it every day, no one would ever see her without it. Even when she went running in Prospect Park, it would be like a third arm, only with pockets.
Stephen gently set his credit card down on the counter, and nodded. The salesgirl had seen this sort of interaction before, and didn’t raise an eyebrow. Laura wondered what she was thinking, but didn’t know how to stop what had already been put in motion, She imagined stamping her feet and walking out of the store, saying something like how dare you, making all of the other shoppers turn and stare. Instead she just watched with her mouth slightly open as the bag was wrapped and decorated like a Christmas tree, and tried to smile.
* * *
Laura liked to think that she knew a little about poetry, and it seemed appropriately redemptive to leave the crowded sidewalks and glossy storefronts for a dark apartment. The John Keats house was right next to the Spanish Steps, just a bit further down the street. They walked in the small side-door and up a flight of stairs, Laura still clutching her shopping bag as if to ward off thieving poets, dead or alive. She could always sell it later, she thought. It didn’t really mean anything to her, not like the inexpensive wedding band she’d worn for years, a year even after John’s death.
The museum was small, only a few rooms, and even those rooms were mostly just bookshelves. Laura and Stephen circled each other, moving in and out of each small room, stopping here and there to examine a poem mounted on the wall, or a lock of hair in a glass case. Keats had only lived there a few months, while trying to stave off the inevitable, and so there weren’t very many of his things to gawk at — it wasn’t like Graceland, where Laura had once looked at every object and thought, That was Elvis’s toothbrush, that was Elvis’s ashtray.
The smallest room, overlooking the steps, was where he had actually died. There was a plaque — In this room/ on the 23rd of February 1821/ died/ John Keats, so she knew for sure. Laura reached that room first, while Stephen was reading some Byron in the gift shop. In spite of the swanky location, and the view of the Bernini fountain below, Laura thought it did look like a room in which someone would die. It was narrow, with little more than a bed. His friends would have had to crouch beside him, or to pull in a chair from another room. There were letters he had written, his longhand still sharp and angled — did someone come in and help prop him up, tuck a firm pillow behind his back? He had been young, even younger than her John, who she had always imagined as the youngest person who ever died, as though the amount of unfairness would increase if there were no one younger. His loss had been the greatest squandering.
It took her a few minutes to notice the death mask. It was in a small glass cube, floating on a piece of dark, cherry wood, suitably somber. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted. His nose was large and curved. The pale color — even more white than ivory — looked about right. He probably hadn’t eaten in days. He hadn’t seen the sun in weeks; the curtains had kept his skin from the light, which would have hurt his eyes. Laura had seen it. She had sat right here, in this chair, beside this bed, held John’s hand while it sweat and twitched. Cancer wasn’t so different from consumption, really. You were still being eaten alive from the inside out. Laura shut her eyes when she heard footsteps. Stephen was a large man, and his footfalls were heavy, always announcing his arrival. John had been quiet, a shadow from the beginning.
“At least it was gradual,” Stephen said. “He knew what was coming.” He was talking about Keats, but Laura was still sitting by her John’s bed, holding her husband’s cold hand.
Jane, the blonde, the good, the dead, had gone quickly. This was a dangerous patch of ice they sometimes skated across, too thin to support their combined weight. “Better to be hit by a bus,” she said. “Then all anyone can remember is how gorgeous you were, how effervescent and funny. This way, it’s like dying all day long, every day, and everyone who loves you get to watch as bits and pieces chip off.” She pointed to the death mask. “Do you think that’s how he looked? His cheeks all sunken and jowly? He was a kid!” In the first months after John’s death, before she started seeing Rose, Laura had gone to some meetings for widows held at the Y nearest her house. She was the youngest by nearly fifty years. She didn’t know what they were complaining about, these old women, who’d had entire lives with their husbands, babies, babies who’d had babies. All she had were some poems he’d written in college, his books, his clothes, a few years, and his early death.
“I guess you’re right,” Stephen said, swallowing. He didn’t always take the bait. In the dark room, his blond curls looked like hiding places for secret objects, tiny treasures. Laura thought he looked like Batman, his handsome face a series of planes all leading up to his strong chin. It was the sort of chin a boxer would love.
Part Four
Laura and Stephen had been dating nearly six months before Laura wanted to have sex. John had been her first, her only, and just getting over the weirdness of it all took longer than she expected. Every time she and Stephen would be tangled up on the couch, making out fully clothed, she would feel his erection through his pants and she would have to leave. She just wasn’t sure she could go through with it.
The day it happened, John had been dead for three years and seven months. Jane the blonde-and-good had been gone half as long. They only needed to do it once, and Laura remembered, oh, right. Then she wanted to have sex all the time. Not only was it fun, but it was an excellent way to get Stephen to stop looking at her with those green eyes, too green for her. All of a sudden, she didn’t feel like just a widow anymore, the walking reminder to all of her friends and colleagues that they, too, would die someday, or, even worse, have to be saddled with this kind of loss. She bought a new lipstick and lost five pounds. Everyone told her how good she looked, even John’s mother, who must have guessed the reason.
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 furthest afield. 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 church-y, doesn’t it?” Stephen gestured towards 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 though wax might have jumped onto his skin from below, as though a burn might have appeared.
“Listen.” What she supposed to look, or listen? Laura thought about her eyes and ears taking smoke-breaks while the others worked. The ears would sun-tan, 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 shoplifiting. This was number five. Laura began to respond, but Stephen raised his hand a few inches of the table. He wasn’t finished. Laura felt her chin turn slightly to one side, like a dog who has 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 cock-eyed 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 towards the ceiling, as if already seeing what was to come.
When the elevator reached the fifth floor, Stephen led Laura into their room backwards, 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.
Part Five
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 upwards, the backwards 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 towards 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 off 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. Thought 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 blonde-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 blonde and good as much as she thought about John? There was no way to tell. He didn’t describe her as blonde 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 Galleria 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.”
“What are they doing?” Laura blushed, her voice was too loud for the room. There were other people circling, seeing the scene from all sides. Laura forgot that she did not have roots descending into the basement and the park beneath them, and that she, in fact, could move.
“She’s getting away. He’s the God of something or other, Light, I think, and he was going to rape her, but she turns into a tree to escape,” Stephen said.
Laura felt faint, as though she wanted to sit down, or to walk, but she couldn’t. “Like she would do anything to get away, to move on,” she said. Stephen came closer. Together, they looked at Daphne’s open eyes, at her splayed fingers, each of which had sprouted branches. Apollo’s hand, still reaching. “But she didn’t quite understand that this is how it would be.” Laura felt a hand around her waist, and for a moment imagined it was Apollo, reaching for her, begging her to stay, already knowing in his marble heart that she was gone.
