The waiter brought Margie an Americano. Maria leaned back and lit up a cigarette. The smoke drifted up into her face and she waved it away.
“You’re my friend and friends have to be honest,” she said. “I’ve got two pieces of advice for you. Call me crazy, tell me we’re no longer friends, but I have to say this. I think you should leave your husband and I think you should buy an apartment in Rome.”
Margie laughed. “No halfway measures, huh?”
“You’re fifty-three. You’re in your prime. It doesn’t last forever. You gave him thirty … what?”
“Thirty-five.”
“You gave him thirty-five years. That’s half your life. Americans believe in therapy. It works for some things, it doesn’t work for this. Love is a mystery and it comes and goes, nobody has ever understood it. People long for permanence. It’s a beautiful idea but it doesn’t exist. Because experience changes us. It’s not in our natures to be stable. People crave stability until we get a good hard look at it and then we long for freedom and the next adventure. So we have to adapt, or else go crazy.”
“Why should I buy an apartment?”
Maria stubbed out the cigarette and leaned forward and laid her hands down on the table, her fingers spread. “Number one, you will love living here. Rome is an international city. You will find things here you could not dream of. Or things you could only dream of. The light of the ages. Magic. Freedom of the spirit. All of your needs satisfied. I can show you if you want to see for yourself, but number two, I have bought and sold four apartments for myself in the past eight years and it was the most fantastic investment I ever made.”
She leaned forward and whispered, “One hundred fifty percent profit over eight years. One hundred fifty. The stock market is broken. Banks pay next to nothing. Gold is for the Swiss. Diamonds, art, rare musical instruments—nothing compares to real estate.
“I have friends in the business. I can get discounts,” she said, leaning back. “But only if you want. I don’t want to sell you anything you don’t want. It’s neither here nor there to me. I only offer as a friend.”
And then she leaned forward and whispered again. “The hotel where Papa and my mama made love and created me—it has been made into condominiums. Very nice. Not far from here. The room they occupied that night—on the fourth floor, looking toward St. Peter’s—it’s for sale. Do you want to see it?”
Yes, actually she did want to see it.
“The day after tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll talk to my friends and see what deal I can get. I’ll give you the address.” She wrote it out in a big hand—No. 25 Via Maggio—and gave it to Margie and leaned forward and took her into a big warm embrace. “I am so lucky to find you,” said Maria. “I always wanted a friend like you. An openhearted American friend.” She signaled the waiter and asked for a Campari and soda. “We’d be even dearer friends if you lived here.
“A well-adjusted person needs two cultures, not one,” she said, clinking the ice in her drink. “This is the place where you can become you. This is your safe place. Your holy place. There is a great spiritual depth here and not just the church. Pagan spirits too. The spirit of the immortal past can illuminate your soul. It sounds hocus-pocus but it’s the wisdom of Italy. The past is fertilizer and we blossom from it.”
She wasn’t sure about pagan spirits illuminating her soul, but the idea of divorce—maybe she should think about it.
Well, actually she was thinking about it.
A woman in Sartell got a divorce last year because her husband was always chuckling. She told him to stop and he couldn’t. Or didn’t. So she told him she was leaving him and he chuckled. It was in the paper. So what about emotional abandonment?
She went to an Internet café and Googled “divorce, grounds,” and found that in marriage, nothing is trivial. People had split up over the failure of one spouse to use coasters. A woman in Wisconsin had divorced her husband for beginning every sentence with the word “So.” “So,” he’d say, “we going to town now or what?” “So,” he’d say, “what’s for supper then?”
Snoring was grounds for divorce, and farting, and peeing in the shower, but about emotional abandonment, nothing. She found a web site called Divorce Q&A for Women.
Q: My husband got into a snit because I asked him to turn down the sound of the basketball game which he and his friend Mike were watching in the living room. We live in a mobile home and I work an early morning shift as a crossing guard at an elementary school on the other side of town and must leave the house at 4 A.M. to take two different buses to get there and then walk ten blocks, all to work four hours at $8/hr, so I need my sleep, and there he was drinking beer at 10 p.m. and hollering about a stupid basketball game, and I asked him to please be quiet, and he went to Mike’s house and has spent nights there for three weeks. Is that abandonment? (He returns home in the mornings after I’ve left.)
A: If he comes back, it is not abandonment.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the law myself,” said Lyle, looking over Margie’s shoulder at the screen. She jumped and tried to close the Q & A window.
“How’s everything going?” said Marilyn, pulling up a chair.
“Fine,” said Margie, closing the window.
Marilyn said, “Don’t worry. You’re not the first person to think about divorce. I’ve thought about it fifteen times. So has Lyle, I’ll bet.” He nodded.
“Not so much since I hit my head, but before that, I did.”