Italian for Beginners Page 22

  Once outside the restaurant, I broke into a run as fast as my heels would take me. I had the feeling that Michael would try to follow me, and I didn’t want to hear his explanation. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing he could say that could make any of this excusable or understandable.

  I initially headed toward the apartment, but as I drew closer, I realized that Karina would probably come back soon to find me. I didn’t want to talk to her tonight, not about Michael. I needed to be alone.

  I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the Ponte Sant’Angelo. I would have walked, but with the heels I had on, I suspected my feet would have been destroyed in a mass of blisters before I got there. I paid the fare and walked slowly across the bridge toward the Castel Sant’Angelo, which was casting a glow over the river beneath it. I finally settled near one of the statues on the far side, the angel holding a cross, and leaned into the marble railing. All around me, Rome glowed in the darkness.

  I closed my eyes and let the breeze from the water tickle my face gently.

  I knew that my anger at Michael was out of proportion. I barely knew the man, and in truth, we’d had an undeniable connection, but it had lasted only a few days, until I found out the truth.

  What bothered me most, though, and what made me feel so terribly angry at him, was that seeing him try to cheat on his wife was like watching my mother at work. I had no doubt that, in the time she was gone, she’d had many affairs. And wasn’t Michael doing the same thing to his spouse and child?

  I sat on the bridge, lost in my own thoughts, until I heard church bells in the distance tolling midnight. I shook myself out of it. There had been a small, foolish part of me that had hoped, a little bit, that Michael would come find me on the bridge. I had, after all, told him it was my favorite place in Rome. If he really had something to tell me, if there was some explanation I was missing, he would have come after me, wouldn’t he?

  But the truth was, there was no excuse. He was married. I was just as alone as ever.

  I pulled out my cell phone, took a deep breath, and called my father, the one person who had never let me down.

  “Hi, Cat!” he said when he answered the phone. “How are you, sweetheart? How’s Rome?” It was still early in New York, just past 6 p.m., and I knew he was probably tuning in to the evening news while he cooked himself a dinner for one—Hamburger Helper, maybe, or a frozen meal. I could almost see him in my mind, and it made me miss him and miss my life back in New York.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said. I closed my eyes for a moment. It was good to hear his voice. “Rome’s been great. I’m sorry I haven’t called.”

  He laughed. “You don’t have to check in with me, honey. I’m doing just fine.”

  “Good,” I said. I took a deep breath. “Dad, I need to know something.”

  “Sure, sweetheart. What is it?”

  I paused, not quite sure how to phrase it. “Dad, when Mom left, why did you wait for her?” I asked.

  He was quiet for a moment. “What do you mean?” he asked in a flat voice.

  “I mean, why didn’t you ask her for a divorce?” I said. “Why did you wait for her to come back to you? Why did you let her hurt you?”

  He sighed. “Cat, it’s not as simple as that.”

  “What’s not simple about it?” I asked. I could feel my temper rising a little, as it did every time I heard my father defend my mother.

  “Cat,” my father said slowly, “I know your mother made a lot of mistakes. And the biggest was to walk out and miss most of your childhood.”

  I swallowed hard, but I didn’t say anything.

  “But, honey,” he continued, “I wasn’t perfect, either. Your mother and I had a lot of problems, and I did some things to push her away.”

  “So what?” I asked. “Couples fight. That doesn’t mean one of them gets to leave while the other one hangs on.”

  “Cat, I loved your mother with all my heart,” my father said slowly. “She made a lot of mistakes. But so did I.”

  “Dad, you can’t blame yourself for what happened,” I said.

  “Cat,” he said firmly. “You don’t understand everything.” He paused, and his voice softened. “What is this all about, honey? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said quickly. I was blinking back unexpected tears.

  “Then why all the questions?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  He paused. “Are you planning to see your mother’s family over there?”

  “No,” I said instantly.

  The silence stretched on so long that, for a moment, I was sure we’d been disconnected. “Cat, I think maybe you should,” he said.

  I looked out at the dark street, the buildings of the ancient city casting shadows all around me. “No,” I said. “I think maybe I should let Mom go and forget about her.” Before my father could respond, and before he could hear my voice shaking, I said a hasty good-bye and told him I’d call him later in the week.

  “I love you, Dad,” I added.

  “I love you, too,” he said slowly, his voice sad.

  I hung up, and blinking back tears, I flagged down a cab and asked the driver to take me to Marco’s.

  “Hi,” Marco said, blinking sleepily at me from his doorway when I arrived fifteen minutes later. His sandy hair was flattened by sleep, and he was wearing only a pair of boxers with little white ducks on them. “What are you doing here?”

  I felt instantly foolish. My mind had been spinning with thoughts of Michael and of my parents; I hadn’t even stopped to consider how inappropriate it would be to drop in on Marco unannounced in the middle of the night. Not to mention the fact that he had returned from Venice today and hadn’t called me yet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said quickly, looking down at my feet. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  I could feel his eyes on me as my face flamed. “Of course you should have,” he said finally. He reached out and pulled me into his arms, pressing me into his bare chest. “You can always come here.”

  I could feel the hot moisture of my tears on his chest before I even knew I was crying.

  “Cat,” he said in a soothing voice, stroking my hair. “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, sobbing harder. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  “Shhhhh,” he whispered into the top of my hair, ruffling it with his breath. The sensation sent chills through me. “It’s going to be all right.”

  He pulled me into his apartment, kicking the door gently closed behind us.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked after a moment.

  I shook my head. “No,” I whispered.

  I looked up. Our eyes met first, and then I closed mine, and a moment later, I could feel his lips pressing against mine, gently at first. I responded with a hunger I didn’t realize I had, pressing myself into him as our kisses became deeper and more intense. Since his studio apartment was so small, we had only a few steps to go to reach his bed, and we tumbled into it clumsily, with both of us working to tug off first my shirt, then my jeans.

  “Are you sure?” Marco asked as he fumbled with the hook to my bra.

  “Yes,” I said firmly, into his mouth.

  “You want to do this?” he asked. “You’re sure?” he asked again.

  “Yes,” I repeated. I wasn’t thinking; I was on autopilot as I helped him with my bra and then reached down for his boxers.

  A moment later, after scrambling to find a condom in his underwear drawer, Marco was inside me. I closed my eyes and lost myself in the moment, holding on to him tightly, afraid that if I let go, I’d drift away forever.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I left early the next morning before Marco woke up, kissing him lightly on his forehead and then again on his lips after he stirred. I stared silently out the cab window on the way home, numbly wondering what I’d just done. My emotions had been stripped raw.

  Karina had slipped a note under my door, but I didn’t re
ad it; I picked it up and put it on my bedside table, then I changed quickly into pajamas, washed the night off my face, and crawled into bed.

  When the phone rang a few hours later, I felt like I’d fallen asleep just moments before. I cracked an eye open and squinted at the clock. It was seven in the morning. I looked at the caller ID. It was my father. It was the middle of the night in New York. Something had to be wrong for him to be calling.

  I grabbed the receiver, fully awake, a panicky feeling inside me.

  “Cat?” It was my father.

  “Dad, are you all right?” I asked right away.

  “Yes, yes, everyone’s fine,” my father soothed quickly.

  “Oh,” I said. My heart slowed and I took a deep breath. “So what’s going on? It’s, like, one in the morning there.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry to call like this. But I’ve been thinking about your phone call all evening.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

  “I know you didn’t.” He paused. “But there are some things you should know.”

  “What things?”

  There was a long silence. “Dad?” I asked tentatively.

  “I cheated on your mother, Cat,” my father blurted out.

  I think my heart stopped beating. “What?” I whispered.

  “It was just a one-night stand,” he said quickly. “It didn’t mean anything. But it was a few months before she left, and when she found out about it, I think it was the final straw.”

  “You cheated on Mom?”

  He sighed. “Things had been bad between us for a while. But there was no excuse for what I did. No excuse. I tried to apologize. I tried to tell her it didn’t mean anything. But she said it had ruined everything. I had betrayed her trust. And she was right.”

  I was speechless.

  “Cat, honey?” my father asked after a moment of silence.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I said softly. “I mean, when we were older, at least?”

  “Because your mother asked me not to,” he said. He sounded choked up. “She knew how badly she had hurt you by leaving. She didn’t want you girls to hate me, too. Even when she came back, she made me promise to never tell. ‘The girls need someone they can respect,’ she always said. She said it would never be her, because of what she had done to you by leaving. She wanted you to be able to respect me.”

  I was silent.

  “Cat?” My father said tentatively after a moment. “Say something.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “If you want to hate me, honey, that’s okay,” he said. “I hope you don’t. But if you do, I understand. I spent years there hating myself. Blaming myself for your mother leaving.”

  I thought about it. “Dad, you didn’t make her leave,” I said finally. “No matter what happened, you didn’t make her leave her family. That was her decision. She left us.”

  “I know, honey,” he said. “She regretted it the rest of her life. I know she did. And you have every right to feel the way you do.” He paused. “I guess I just needed you to know that it wasn’t all as black-and-white as it might have seemed to you at the time. And it’s a big part of why I never wanted to give up on her. We loved each other, Cat. We always did. We just both made a lot of mistakes.”

  I thought about love and loss, decisions and consequences. “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  “Your sister, she’s okay,” my father said. “I’ve never worried much about her. But you, you’re still carrying around this heavy heart about your mom.” He paused. “Knowing that you’re over there, where she came from, still refusing to let yourself forgive her, well, it breaks my heart.”

  “You think she deserves to be forgiven?” I asked him.

  “I think everyone deserves forgiveness, Cat,” he said.

  My father told me sadly that he knew it was a lot to take in but that he hoped I would think about things and call him when I was ready. I agreed and, still shaken to the core, said good-bye.

  I sat there on the edge of my bed for a while, thinking about things.

  My dad’s revelation hadn’t really changed anything, had it? I mean, sure, perhaps my father wasn’t the faultless martyr I’d made him out to be in my mind. But I’d known that anyhow, on some level. I had never expected an admission of cheating—he didn’t seem the type—but I knew he had an Irish temper, and I had many memories of my parents screaming at each other in the living room when they thought Becky and I were asleep. I used to crawl into bed with her and cover her ears so that she wouldn’t hear them, but when I was protecting her, there were no hands left to cover my own ears. I always heard every word through our apartment’s thin walls.

  He used to yell at her that she had ruined his life, and she would shout back that she should have married someone, anyone, but him. He would tell her that before her, he’d had all sorts of dreams and that she had taken them all away. She would tell him that he had his head in the clouds, anyhow, and would never have made good on his dreams regardless. One of them would end the argument with a top-of-the-lungs “I hate you,” and my father would usually storm out for a few hours. I’d always hear him come home in the middle of the night, long after I should have been asleep. He’d tiptoe into the living room, sometimes knocking into the coffee table in the dark, and I’d hear him open the door to the bedroom he shared with my mom. I’d hear them murmur softly to each other, and I knew everything was okay. Then and only then would I be able to fall asleep.

  Sometimes, when we were young, one of them would casually ask Becky and me whether we’d heard anything strange the night before. Becky, who always slept through it all, would shake her head and say no. I would force my own face into a blank expression and tell them I didn’t know what they were talking about. They would always exchange relieved glances and go back to pretending things were okay.

  So to know that there was discord between my parents before my mother left was no major revelation. But to know that my father had cheated, and that he had hurt my mother in those final months of normalcy, somehow shifted things in my mind. The shift was slight— not enough to make me blame my father or feel furious that I hadn’t known before. But it was enough that, for the first time in years, I was able to see my mother as someone wounded, not just as someone heartless. It didn’t change what she had done, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to understand how a mother could leave her children. But it did provide another piece to the puzzle. And it made me realize that as much as I thought I knew the situation inside and out, maybe there were still a lot of pieces missing.

  Maybe it was time I went about putting the puzzle back together instead of turning my back on it.

  I showered, threw on a casual cream-colored sundress, and left with my camera slung over my shoulder before Karina could come talk to me. I had the feeling that she’d come knocking on my door to talk about Michael as soon as she got a break at the restaurant. But I still wasn’t ready to talk about him. I didn’t even want to think about him.

  Instead, I set off toward Piazza Colonna, a square off the Via del Corso that I’d never been to before. In fact, I’d deliberately avoided it, although it housed an impressive monument, the Column of Marcus Aurelius, an intricately detailed, 135-foot marble column that had been completed just before the end of the second century. But it wasn’t the column I was interested in seeing today. It was the tiny scarf store on a side street off the main plaza.

  I’d known about it for years. I didn’t even need to consult a map to get there. I’d traced the path there on paper so many times that it was burned into my mind. And yet I’d never gone. I’d never wanted to. Until today.

  The streets were quiet, so grabbing a cab near the Pantheon wasn’t a problem, and we didn’t have to fight much traffic to get to our destination. I had the driver drop me off on the east side of the piazza, and I crossed it quickly, barely looking at the column and its beautifully carved scenes as I hurr
ied by.

  I wound through the side streets like I’d been doing it all my life until I ended up on Via della Guglia. I saw the shop right away, up ahead on the right. It was small and unassuming with a big picture window in front displaying an array of brightly colored, beautiful scarves. Big, cursive letters on the window identified it: Sciarpe dalla Famiglia Verdicchio. Scarves by the Verdicchio Family. Scarves by my family.

  I stared for a long time, transfixed by the sight of something I had always imagined but had never seen. I’d met my mother’s family only once, when I was a toddler. I remembered almost nothing about them, other than that my grandfather had smelled like smoke and my grandmother had smelled like licorice. In family albums I had flipped through before my mother left, my mother and her sister Gina, just eighteen months younger than her, looked so similar that my mother always said they were mistaken for twins. I had committed the faces of my grandparents and aunt to memory from those albums, and from the Christmas cards they would send each year. But the cards stopped coming the year that my mother died, so the most recent images I had of these people were seventeen years old. I didn’t know if I’d recognize them. In fact, I didn’t even know if they were still alive.

  It was early still, and the street was nearly deserted. The lights were off inside the store, and there was no one inside. I stopped to peer in, pressing my nose to the glass.

  The dark store seemed to throb with muted colors. Neatly folded silk scarves hung from racks, separated by colors. Scarves in brilliant blues and purples sat in the center of the store, while there were pinks, oranges, and reds off to the left, yellows and greens to the right, and blacks, beiges, and whites toward the front. The whole right wall was lined with wooden shelves, on which sat folded pashminas in every color of the rainbow. Through the darkness of the interior, I could just make out the glass-enclosed case on which the cash register sat. The case, too, was filled with small scarves in all colors of the rainbow.