Carl was very courtly to her that evening. Did he know about Paolo? Had she been spotted? Rome wasn’t so big you could assume secrecy. “What did you do today?” he said, in a kind way, not accusingly. “Just living my life, walking around, seeing the sights,” she said. True enough. “Glad you’re having a good time,” he said. He had unbent from his pissy attitude toward the Italians and he’d even adopted some of their style. He opened doors for her, bowing slightly, and offered her his hand up stairs, a courtier in a green nylon jacket and chinos. Once, offering her a chair in a restaurant, he even kissed her hand. Tuesday night, there he was in a sidewalk café near the river, sitting by her side, chatting her up, charming her with witty asides. Affecting a certain Continental style, a knowingness. Everyone had been content to stick with Chianti and then Carl out of the blue ordered a bottle of Tignanello. And pronounced it without hesitation. The waiter was impressed. He uncorked it and poured a splash into a glass and Carl swirled the wine around in a professional manner and tasted it.
“How is it?” said Wally. “Looks like wine to me.”
“I like it. It’s more complex,” he said.
Carl had never commented on the complexity of wine before in his life. Nor had he ever indicated a preference for complexity, not in wine or anything else. And then he drank the wine and said, “One thing you get the sense of, being here in Rome, I must say—you get the feeling that there is a great great deal about life in this world that we will never understand and maybe we should stop trying to and just enjoy what we have.”
“Let me write that down, Shakespeare,” said Wally.
“I’m serious. Americans think we can understand everything and then solve it. Italians are different. Maybe it’s enough just to live your life.”
“Thank you for the poem,” he said to her on the way back to the hotel. She had sent him the poem that ended, I hope you know, my darling one / I love you, after all is said and done.
“That’s nice that you’re writing poems again.”
“It’s not finished,” she said.
They made love that night. He lay in bed reading and she took a shower and stood by the bed toweling herself dry, one leg up on the bed. It felt like an Audrey Hepburn movie, except more explicit. He peered over the top of his book at her. It was Beachhead in Italy, about the 1944 campaign, bought used at a curbside book table for one euro, a small triumph for Carl. She dried her legs and spread cream on them and pulled on her green warm-up pants and her IF YOU’RE COLD, PUT ON A SWEATER Tshirt. They lay side by side reading and then he turned out his light, and they lay on their backs for a while. “You having a good time?” he said. She said she was. “Everybody seems to be doing okay.” And then he turned toward her and put his arm across her belly, and hitched his leg up over her leg, and she turned toward him and slipped her hand under his T-shirt, and the rest came flowing along naturally. A miracle. Pure divine intervention. She had said prayers to St. Helen, the patron saint of older women and the lovelorn in general, and the good saint, who had received her martyrdom at the hands of Eskimos in Greenland who set her adrift on an iceberg, came to Margie’s aid, and suddenly Carl was her boyfriend again. It was nice. Very nice. And when it was over, he pulled his pajamas on and she put her head on his shoulder. And almost said, “That was wonderful.” Could have said it. But did not. She said, “Remember the time we went to Chicago for our anniversary and stayed at that famous hotel that turned out to be a welfare hotel with thousands of cockroaches that stampeded when we switched the light on, so we drove around and went to the Drake and you said, ‘Hang the expense,’ and we sat in that bar with about a thousand photographs of famous people nobody ever heard of, and it was just us and the bartender and the pianist with black horn-rims and a guy back in the shadows who when our pupils adjusted to the light we saw was Robert De Niro. Remember?” He shook his head.
“He wore a tan raincoat. I smiled at him and he smiled back.”
“You must’ve been with someone else.”
“Darling, I’ve never been with someone else. The next night we saw Chorus Line and you hated it.”
“Maybe you dreamed it.“
“No. Sorry. Not Chorus Line—Forest Time—that musical about the magical grove where people never grow old. It was really really bad. But there was a song called ‘Mr. Happy’ and you said, ‘I’m so happy that I was able to talk you into marrying me.’ Remember?”
He shook his head.
She sang: “We’ve got love in our hearts, and sweet melodies, and we’re dancing our way through the trees.”
“Never heard it,” he said.
“Do I know you?” she said. “Did you father those children or was that someone else?”
He had already turned over and was lightly snoring. She stood at the window, naked, arms folded, looking out into the little courtyard. The dry fountain, wooden benches piled against it, workmen’s toolboxes. How incomplete life is and unceasing. Three months she had waited to make love—longed for it, imagined it—and now there it was, done, and … life is still incomplete.
Nothing changes. We’re still standing at the window, wishing for something else. You get your kids raised and out the door and realize you don’t know any more than when you started. The Pope says High Mass and then he sits down and eats a cheese sandwich. You go to Rome for the experience of a lifetime and then it’s time to go home and put in the tomatoes.
The next morning, she poked her head out of the bathroom, toothbrush in her mouth, and said, “That was nice, last night.” He murmured, lying in bed, his nose in Beachhead in Italy. She said, “It’s been such a long time. Why?”
“I thought you weren’t interested.”
“And that’s why you went and slept in the guest room for three months?”
“I’m not upset, I’m just asking. Is that why you left our bedroom?”
He looked up. He wasn’t good at this sort of conversation. She knew that. But hey, it’s life. You’re fifty-five. Get used to it. “I just wished that sometimes you’d say that you wanted to make love with me.”
“And you were waiting for me to say that?”
He nodded.
So he had simply gone on strike. He had withdrawn his services until she asked for them to be resumed. And that led to the romantic getaway to Rome and that led to a half million in cool cash. Everything connects.
And down to breakfast they went. He took her hand, which had a coffee cup in it, and pressed it to his lips and whispered something like “love of my life” and then bowed and went back to the men’s table where they were studying a map of the Allies’ advance toward Rome through the Padiglione Woods and the Alban Hills. Wally was reading a history of the Allied campaign of 1944. The hilly wooded terrain favored the German defenders who retreated slowly, making the Americans and British pay dearly for each hill. It took five months of bitter fighting before General Clark got his picture taken parading into Rome and marching up the stairs to Michelangelo’s City Hall.
She said good morning to Wally and Evelyn and Father Wilmer.
“How are you?” she said.
“Someday,” said Father, looking down at his scrambled eggs, “women will have their eggs removed, and fertilized in a laboratory, and after the embryo has developed for a few days, they’ll go in and rearrange the chromosomes to give people what they want in a child—math ability, resistance to colds, physical agility, verbal skills, blue eyes, small feet, you name it, you can have it. Every child will be a designer child. No flaws. I saw a program about this on TV last night. The BBC. And let me just say: that is a paradise I will be glad not to be living in.”
Miss Gennaro’s burial was at 10:00A.M. and the pilgrims were all on deck at nine, dressed for the occasion, though Margie had told them, “You don’t have to go. You really shouldn’t feel obligated. None of us ever met the lady. I’m going because her daughter is the one who called me in January and told me about Gussie. Her mother was a friend of Gussie’s, the old lady who died.”
“How did she know Gussie?” said Eloise. “She was Italian.”
“They were very good friends. I’ll explain later.”
Eloise pulled back the curtain and looked out at the street. “That white truck has been parked there all night,” she said. “Isn’t that suspicious?”
Margie ignored her.
“Don’t you think about a terrorist attack?” she said, eyeballing the humanity passing by. “What if a bomb went off? We’d be blown to pieces.”
“Depends on how close you are.”
“What a ridiculous way to die—blown up on a trip that I never wanted to take in the first place.”
“You never wanted to what?” Margie laughed. “You were all over this from the moment I told you. You were flapping around like a hawk on a rabbit. Nobody twisted your arm. So what’s your problem now?”
Eloise said she was sorry. It was just lack of sleep. Anxiety about her kids. Anger at the Fred situation. “And I’m worried about you,” she said.
Well, that was a new one. “Worried about what?”
Eloise looked at her. That serious maternal look. “Are you seeing someone while you’re here?”
“I’m seeing all sorts of people. I’m looking at you right now.”
She smiled. “You know what I mean.”
“Of course not,” she said. But there was a telltale hesitation before she said it. And not enough astonishment written on her face.
“Be careful, darling,” said Eloise. “Don’t blow up your house for a little excitement, you can get enough excitement from books.” And she got in the van.
So Eloise knew. Someone had told her, and maybe that someone had told someone else. And if that second someone were Irene or Evelyn, then likely there would be a scene. A righteous woman confronting the sinner. Carl would get wind of it. He’d be terribly hurt. He’d pull back into his shell and it would be up to Margie to resolve the outcome—go home to Minnesota? Stay in Rome?
That afternoon, she called up the American Overseas School on Via Cassia. Who, a kind lady with a New York accent informed her, were not hiring teachers now, but maybe she should try the Thavis School of Language (“The gifts God gave us are nurtured at Thavis”) so she did and a young man told her that indeed Thavis was looking for a native English speaker to teach full-time starting immediately, salary of $43,000 a year. “Think about it,” he said. Oh, she was thinking about it. Yes, indeed.