Clive and I are actually at the airport, waiting to go to Paris. His parents, all upset by the news, called my parents and told them about the trip and promised that it would be good for me and that they’d be with us 24/7 yada, yada, yada, and that they’d watch out all the time and more than that, they’d treat me like their own daughter. Anyway, we have more than three weeks off and if I were home, all I could do is get in trouble.
The truth is my parents didn’t need convincing. They wanted me out of the way because my dad is going on trial. It’s going to be a media circus and they see Europe as a safer universe. So they thanked Clive’s parents and my dad told them he was grateful.
“I’ll remember it,” he said.
I try to forget about the trial and my worries about him and what will happen because Super Mario always gets him out, and I live in the moment and the time in Paris and Rome and Milan and London seems to rush together in a joyous nonstop blur of extraordinary old hotels with suites with gilded antiques and door-size windows and marble baths and feather beds and long-stemmed roses and chocolate croissants and room service forever there to satisfy your every wish, at your door in minutes with endless wine and coq au vin and all kinds of pâté and stuff. And everything comes hidden under enormous silver domes and Clive doesn’t think anything about all of that because for him this is just his normal abnormal life.
But I am constantly like, “I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,” which he thinks is funny, but finally one day he stops laughing and looks at me seriously and shakes his head.
“Yes, but, Gia, all this isn’t what makes you happy, you know?”
“Maybe not, but it doesn’t make you unhappy either, you know?”
“You’ll see” is all he says, looking back at me.
In between going to boutiques and perfume stores and looking at shoes and dresses and hats and T-shirts and underwear and taking pictures of everything that I love because the article will be mostly a collage of cool pictures of out-there fashion that I love, we go low end and visit cheapie department stores, which are Europe’s answer to Target and Forever 21, then to flea markets like Les Puces de Saint-Ouen in Paris and Porta Portese in Rome and the Portobello Market in London. And I buy things off tables, like beaded necklaces and lacy thongs for less than five dollars and we bargain because you’re supposed to and take care with our wallets because of pickpockets.
Clive is watching all this and we’re goofing on people and his parents. We stop for onion soup in a little café and it arrives all steamy and smells like heaven and has a thick glob of Swiss or whatever cheese melted all crisp over the top. I just about faint because it’s so delicious and then I have to go to the bathroom only there really isn’t one, it’s just a hole in the ground that I have to squat over and I tell Clive and he laughs.
“I forgot to tell you about the ancient bathrooms.”
It’s a trip to see plumbing from the seventeenth century, especially when you’re in completely new surroundings with someone who’s your best friend, not counting Ro.
At night after walking our feet off all day long we usually go out to dinner by ourselves or with Claude and Alice and then sometimes they go upstairs to bed and we sneak out and go walking by the Seine.
“That’s where you see all of humanity,” Clive says.
We watch lovers and homeless people and pickpockets and mangy stray cats and homeless dogs and take pictures without letting anyone know we’re taking their pictures, but then we get totally exhausted too and go to sleep at two a.m. and wake up when the sun shines inside the room through the enormous windows that look out on what seems like a panoramic painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Only it’s not.
It’s a living canvas. It’s a sweeping view of slanty Paris rooftops and the church of Sacré-Coeur high, high up in the distance as if it’s tucked away where it’s safe and close to heaven and it’s all so fairy tale enchanting that I can’t stop taking pictures and want to cry because when things are so perfect it almost hurts to look at them and you want to inhale everything and hold it inside you.
My phone doesn’t work here, which is just as well because I needed a break from my Michael obsessiveness, and anyway, maybe it will help both of us to be an ocean apart.
For our last few days we go to Milan and after visiting the Duomo and walking on the roof and gasping at the view, we go to a department store called La Rinascente.
“Go up to the bathroom,” Clive says.
“Do you think I’m three and don’t know if I have to go?”
He grins. “No, Gia, that’s not what I meant. Go up to the bathroom and look out the window.”
“What for?”
“Just go.”
I take the escalator up and find the bathroom and go in and look out the window. And freeze. I’m staring at a painting in a museum, I think at first. Only it’s not. It’s the real world and it’s the Duomo right there, framed by the window like a painting and lit by the golden afternoon sun, and it’s the most beautiful, spiritual sight I’ve ever seen, so I tear up again, which is crazy.
Then I start thinking about other beautiful things like my dad and our family and how I’m missing them and what I feel for Michael and about this whole extraordinary trip, so I go outside and find Clive and look at him with my misty eyes.
“It was…overwhelming.”
“I knew you’d feel that way, Gia,” Clive says, hugging me. “That’s why I love you.”
Because everything is so perfect, I can’t leave it alone and I have to make it unperfect. Enter Michael again and I start to wonder how this whole trip would be if I were with him, but not just the sex thing, which we would obviously be doing like ten times a day, but everything else—like getting blown away by the risotto and the veal cotoletta and walking on the narrow, winding cobblestone streets and cursing at the insane drivers and finding perfect little boutiques with shoes in colors you didn’t know existed and freaking out about the palazzos with their glossy painted doors and the paintings in the museums and the people and what everyone is wearing.
I wonder if he’d get into it as much as I do and think about changing his life and staying here forever and escaping from crime and everything ugly from back home. But how can I answer those questions because I don’t know Michael, at least not yet. And who knows if that is ever going to change because he’s so impossible to get close to because of his emotional body armor. And maybe he can’t escape either because it’s been a part of him for so long.
For no reason I think of the mystery about Michael’s dad who was a cop too and the stuff that Clive couldn’t find out and wonder about how that could affect who he is and what he thinks. And when we get back and have our computers again, I’ll ask Clive and see if he can hack into his dad’s network again and get behind the firewall.
We leave behind the magical thinking and the fantasy world we explored when we land back in New York and head for the limo waiting for us at the airport. The driver takes our bags, including the twelve new ones with all the stuff we bought, and fits them all into the trunk. While we’re waiting for Clive’s dad, the driver lifts his newspaper and I glance up and in a nanosecond my world implodes.
On the cover of the Post, there’s a picture of Frankie with a one-word headline: Squealer.