Burning the Map (6 page)

Now she sits on her bed, biting a thumbnail, and I can almost imagine her as a little kid with her thumb in her pretty mouth.

“Well, for one thing,” Sin says, “you have a boyfriend.”

“I'm well aware of that,” I say in a haughty tone. How dare she remind me?

“And for another thing, Kat always comes home when she says she will. She's around when you need her. She's a
friend.
”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It's just that…” Lindsey stops, pursing her lips as if trying to gather the right words in her mouth. This makes her look like my mother right before she's about to lay some doozy of a revelation on me, like how she's started masturbating again after a twenty-year hiatus.

“It's just that what you did last night,” Sin says, “blowing us off—it's basically what you've been doing for the last two years.”

Her words hit me like a slap. I sense some shred of reality there, but it seems like an overstatement, a gross generalization.

“I've never said I'd be somewhere and didn't show up.”

“No, maybe not like that, but you've been avoiding us since you started dating John. You never call. You never have time to go out with us anymore. And when we finally do get together, once in a great while, it's like you're not really there. You're just different. You're not like you used to be.”

I can't believe she's saying this. Maybe I've been a little detached lately, but I've been studying for a goddamned living. My life hasn't exactly been a Martha Stewart picnic.

I turn to Kat. “Is that what you think, too?”

“Oh, honey.” She rises to come to me, putting her arm around my shoulders. “It's just that we wish you were around more. We wish it was like the old days.”

“That's not fair,” I say, jabbing a finger at Lindsey. “You haven't been around all that much either, you know.” Lindsey's been putting in ten-to twelve-hour days and lots of weekends at her ad agency. She wants to make vice president within the next year and be the youngest VP ever.

“That's true,” she says, “but I'm going to change that. I have to.”

“Well, things will never be exactly like they were in college, and you can't expect them to be.”

“Maybe it's not fair, sweetie,” Kat says, “but what Sin's talking about is true. You're not the same person we used to know. I mean, I know you're in there somewhere.” She squeezes my shoulders. “I just haven't seen you in so long, and when I do get to actually go out with you, it doesn't seem like you're having much fun.”

“I had fun last night.” I shake her arms off me.

“It's okay,” Kat says. “We just miss you.”

I know what she means. I miss me, too, sometimes. I drop my head in my hands.

But as I sit there, some realization dawns. I raise my face. “Wait a minute. You've felt like this for two years, and you've never said a word?” I'd been a tad mopey for a while, particularly this summer, but they're talking about
two years.
The whole time I've been dating John.

I leave Kat's side and walk across the room to the window. Across the way, I see a couple on their terrace reading papers, eating grapefruit.

I turn back to Kat and Sin, sitting side by side. It's me against them right now, and I hate it.

Kat looks down, then back up at me. Sin shrugs. “We knew you were in love with him.”

“You're supposed to be my best friends. How can you be pissed off at me for years and not say a word?”

Kat blinks a few times like a stumped contestant on
Jeopardy.

“We were just hoping it would go away,” Sin says.

Her words feel like a betrayal.
All this time,
I keep thinking.
All this time they've been holding it back.
We used to be the kind of friends who said anything and everything to each other, the minute the thought occurred to us.

“Hideous,” Kat would say when I came down the stairs
of the sorority house in one of my slutty outfits. “At least take off the fuck-me pumps.”

And Sin didn't know the meaning of holding back, which was something I'd come to love about her. It was Sin who helped me decide on what law school to attend. I'd narrowed it down to Northwestern or Harvard. I was enamored by the thought of Harvard Law School. I liked simply saying those words, and I imagined the tingle I'd get every time I told someone, “Yes, I attend Harvard. Harvard Law School.” I'd only gotten in because my father's boss was an alum who happened to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but that didn't bother me. I just wasn't sure I wanted to move to Boston.

I was debating the subject one night about a month before our college graduation. Sin listened to my list of pros and cons for about ten seconds before she held up her hand and said, “You're not the Harvard Law type.”

“What's
that
supposed to mean?” I sat back and crossed my arms.

“C'mon,” she said. “Harvard Law is Birkenstocks and environmental activism and people whose ancestors went there before them. You're not about that. You're…” She threw her hands up. “You're Steve Maddens and aerosol hair spray, and you're the first person in your family to go to law school.”

I kept my arms crossed over my chest, trying to look insulted, but she was right. She usually was. The next day, I sent my acceptance form to Northwestern.

Now I turn back to the window again. The couple on the terrace is discussing something, grapefruit dishes pushed aside, their heads close together.

All the confidence and allure I fleetingly gained with Francesco drains away. I feel like a day-old balloon. My friends don't feel like friends, and this hurts more than anything in recent memory. I've always had this innate sense that while schools and boys and jobs might pass through my life as if on a high-speed conveyor belt, my friends will be the
one steady force. I should be looking for a way to smooth things over, but I feel attacked and vulnerable.

“Come on, Case. Let's get an early start and head to the catacombs,” Kat says, trying to make nice. “We can talk more about this later.”

“I'm meeting Francesco, and I need to get some sleep first.” My voice is stiff, flat, and even as I say it, I know I should call and cancel. There are two problems with this potential cancellation, though. One, I don't have his phone number. Two, although it's juvenile, I want them to hurt as much as I do.

The room is so quiet it feels like it's made of glass and the slightest movement will shatter us all into pieces.

“Un-fucking-believable.” Lindsey's loud voice breaks the silence, the volume something I haven't heard often. She pauses, but gets no response from me. I stand with my back to her, still staring out the window. “Jesus. You're acting like a fucking child!”

I'm vaguely aware that she has a point, but I'm too stung by their criticism to be mature about it. I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face, feeling jumbled and confused. I can hear them whispering, moving about the room. I brush my teeth and, for lack of something better to do, rearrange the toiletries on the counter, putting the moisturizers and hair products and eye creams in a height line like a row of marionettes.

About ten minutes later, I hear Kat say in an imploring tone, “Leave her alone.”

Footsteps approach the bathroom, then I hear Lindsey's sarcastic voice. “Have fun with your new
friend.
”

A
fter they leave, I lie on the bed with my eyes closed for two hours, although I catch only brief moments of sleep. I can't seem to stop reviewing the argument, re-running each of Kat's and Lindsey's words in my head. My feelings bounce back and forth between furious and betrayed, then skid to the unrealistic hope that they'll walk in the door with doughnuts and cappuccinos.

When I get up, I see a note on the bureau from Kat, ever the peacemaker. “Casey,” it says, “I hope you're okay. Lindsey and I went to the catacombs. We'll meet you back here at four o'clock so we can check out and get to the train station. You are coming with us, right?” I know she probably meant to be humorous, but the question cuts me. As if they don't know me anymore. But isn't that their point?

My fight with Kat and Sin seems to dull everything. The tree outside our window is lackluster now, some of its blooms fading and drooping. Even the thought of being back in Rome doesn't seem as exciting. Yet when I step outside the pensione and hear the anemic chug of Francesco's scooter
rounding the corner, adrenaline shoots back through my veins. I tug my shirt down so that it shows a little more cleavage. I try for an alluring pose on the stoop.

He's wearing sunglasses and a light blue shirt that billows around him as he pulls into the courtyard, slows in front of me and turns off the engine.

“Ciao,”
he says, giving me a grin, a flash of white teeth.

Unfortunately, no witty greeting comes to mind. “Morning,” I say.

“You are ready?”

I nod.

He holds out his hand, and I take it.

 

The bulk of my day with Francesco is a blur of cathedrals, museums, monuments, all amazing in their historical significance, yet rarely included in the standard tours for one reason or another—their disrepair, their locations in crappy or out of the way areas. Francesco gives me morsels of information at each stop, making me momentarily forget this morning's argument, yet it always comes back.

“Look at his beard from this angle,” Francesco says.

We're standing in front of Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses, located in an unassuming, rather hidden church reached only by climbing high stone steps and walking through a tunnel. The gray sculpture is life-size, and strangely, Moses has two horns like the devil.

Francesco takes my elbow and guides me to the right. “It is Michelangelo's own profile cut into the beard,” he says.

I move my head this way and that, squinting my eyes, striving to make out the sculptor's face in the long tangle of stone. I wonder, for a nanosecond, how long it took him to carve this hulking thing, before my mind shifts back into the worn ruts, and instead I start wondering if Michelangelo ever felt unclear, unsure of himself, or if he always knew he was creating a masterpiece. Was his identity ever vague? Did he ever
cheat on a lover and feel guilty for not feeling guiltier? Did he ever argue with his friends and not be able to erase the scene from his head? I keep hearing Kat's and Lindsey's accusations, seeing Lindsey's face frozen in a sneer.

I try to regain the dreamlike reverie I had last night. I grab Francesco's hand, planting a quick, wet kiss on his lips, but daylight and guilt keep fighting against me.

We have lunch during the siesta at a small café near Piazza di Spagna. We sit in a corner by a vine-covered wall, ivory linens on the table.

The place reminds me of a trattoria in Piazza del Popolo where my parents often ate when they visited me. I told them over and over to try other places, other neighborhoods, but they were happy there, they said. They'd gotten to know the menu and the owners. Why try anything new? They seemed perfectly happy with each other then, too. Whatever had transpired over the course of five years to put them where they are now—two tense strangers who happen to share a home—is a mystery to me.

I've received my mother's version, of course, during our way too-frequent telephone conversations.

“You know, Casey,” she'd said. “It's the sex. All of a sudden, he wants nighties and negligees, and I'm in sweatpants and T-shirts.”

“So put on a teddy, Mom,” I'd said, exasperated again, trying very hard not to imagine my father having sexual desires of any kind or picture my mother in a butt-thonged, demicup teddy.

My father, on the other hand, is so closemouthed about the subject of their marital discord, he almost convinces me there's nothing wrong.

But there is. Something is terribly wrong, and it can't simply be about sleepwear.

Francesco brings me back to the present, to Rome, by waving a menu in front of my face. I take it, realizing I'm
starving, since I've eaten little since yesterday. It takes a glass of Pinot Grigio and a huge plate of spaghetti to satiate my appetite, but then I'm ready to move again. Sitting still lets too many thoughts surface.

“What's next?” I ask Francesco.

“It is siesta,” Francesco says. “Nothing is next. Only another glass of wine.”

“There are places open,” I say, putting on my Jackie-O sunglasses that I bought for the trip, deciding they were rather international and cosmopolitan even though they're way too large for my face. “We could go to the catacombs,” I say, collecting my purse, putting some lira on the table. “We could go—”

Francesco cuts me off. “Slow,
bella,
slow,” he says. Gentle words.

I sit back in my chair again. We can't go to the catacombs, anyway. We might run into the girls, and Lindsey might cause Francesco to disappear in a cloud of smoke with one of her nasty stares. She probably scares the shit out of everyone at work.

I sip the cool, tart wine, trying to let myself get drawn back into a lazy conversation with Francesco, the way the Italian siesta was intended to be spent. I know I should enjoy this time, this day, but I'm struck by the fact that in a few weeks, there will be no more siestas for me. Instead, I'll make a haggard run for fast food or a salad and then eat at my desk without breathing. I take another sip of wine to drown the thought.

After siesta, Francesco leads me to a small, graceful fountain in a corner of the Borghese garden, which is situated at the top of the Spanish Steps. I study the curved nymphs of the fountain, attempting to enjoy it along with the surrounding purple blooms, but I'm not really seeing, because the more I think about the situation with Kat and Sin, the more I know they have a point. Sure, we haven't seen each
other as much as we used to, but more importantly, somewhere along the way I stopped being there mentally. I'd still meet them on occasion at some of our regular spots—the River Shannon Pub for Thursday night drafts, Gamekeepers for burgers and the Bulls games—but I hung on the fringes, listening to the conversation rather than taking an active part. I'd opt out of late-night festivities to run to John's condo, where he'd already be sleeping, barely cognizant of my arrival.

Maybe it was because I was overloaded with law school and eventually the bar exam. Or maybe it was my desire to spend more time with John while he just spent an increasing amount of time at work. It could also have been my struggle to hold my family together, which has been like trying to support a stumbling drunk from under the arms. Whatever the reason, it seems that this morning's argument and the absence from home invites a certain self-awareness that lets me see myself more objectively than when I was mired in it all. Unfortunately, I'm not so thrilled with what I've uncovered. I'm still hurt that Sin and Kat felt the way they did for so long, that they couldn't trust me enough to tell me, but I'm as much to blame as they are. I hadn't really told them about my parents, after all. I hadn't confided much in them over the last few years. Somehow we'd gotten away from each other, from the way our friendship used to be.

 

I'd first learned that my parents were having problems about a year and a half ago, when I went home early on Thanksgiving morning. Our suburban stucco house on Orchard Lane was surprisingly quiet that day, and I walked through the place, past photos of graduations and Little League and a very odd one showing me in a nun's costume and my brother, Danny, dressed like a priest for Halloween. No one was in the sunny kitchen with the brown tile floor, or the family room with its overstuffed couches and clutter
of antique lanterns my dad collected. My parents' bedroom door was open. I walked in and peeked my head in the master bath.

“Happy Thanksgiving,” I called out, giddy at the reprieve from studying and the prospect of eating my own body weight in mashed potatoes.

“Casey!” my mom said, a hand flying to her heart. “You scared me.”

It was then I noticed that her blond hair, which was dyed to look like mine—and like hers used to look—was severely pulled back from her face with a thick black headband that I used to wear to high school cheerleading practice.

“What's going on?” I said.

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “I have a question, and this is serious, so I need you to really give this some thought.”

“All right,” I said, leaning on the lime-green countertop, wondering what this was all about and when she would start making the rice casserole with the chunks of sausage.

“Okay,” she said again. “It's either this—” she put both hands to the sides of her face and dragged the skin upward so that she looked like a cat “—or this.” She shifted her hands so that the skin around her eyes was pulled straight back, giving her a rather Asian appearance. She dropped her hands and turned to me. “What do you think?”

“What do I think? What are you talking about?”

She blew out a quick blast of air like she did when dealing with a daft store clerk. “I'm getting a little work done, and Dr. Stangey says I need to decide
exactly
what I want.”

“Work done,” I repeated.

“Yes, you know—face-lift, eye-lift, laser resurfacing, Botox, cheekbone implants.” She cocked her head at me. “I have to decide.”

“Why would you do any of that?” This was a truly shocking turn of events. Not only was my mother an attractive fifty-two-year-old who was always being mistaken for forty,
but she didn't care about these things. She was the mom at the public pool who jumped in with the kids, not minding that her hair got wet, and she'd always spent more on our wardrobes than she did her own.

“It's time,” she said, yanking off the headband, stowing it away in a drawer. “It's time I started paying attention to my appearance. Some men might still find me appealing.”

At the mention of men, I realized the absence of my father and brother. “Where's Dad?” I said.

My mother picked at her hair with a comb, sucking in her cheeks in the mirror. “Working out.”

“On Thanksgiving?”

“Um-hmm.”

And then a better question occurred to me. “Does he know how?” My father didn't belong to a gym that I knew of, but I'd hadn't lived on Orchard Lane for a long time.

“Apparently,” my mother said in a particularly cryptic voice, straightening the lime-green towels on the rack, then moving back to the mirror and yanking at her face again. “So which do you think?” she said, shifting her skin up and down, up and down, until I started to wonder whether I was having a flashback from the ecstasy I did once.

“Have you talked to Danny about this?”

“Ha!” she said, and I couldn't blame her. My brother was a bit of a shit at that point, nearing the end of his adolescence. Still, he lived here, not me, a fact I pointed out to her.

“This is a woman's issue,” she said. “You're the only one I have.”

When my dad didn't come home that day until almost five o'clock, right when my mom was about to serve the pared down Thanksgiving feast she'd prepared—a Butterball turkey from a neighborhood store and Spuds potatoes—it was then I knew that something was truly off. Usually, my dad was in the kitchen right along with my mother, peeling the pota
toes and generally poking his fingers into things that weren't ready.

I pulled Danny aside, asking him what in the hell was going on. But he was a senior in high school, and his vocabulary consisted mainly of two words—
dude
and
whatever
—which is verbatim what he said to me that night. “Dude…
whatever.
”

After I left that weekend, I thought about talking to Kat and Sin about it. I really did. But I knew that it sounded lame—my mom wants to get a face-lift and my dad was late for dinner. It was nothing, nothing at all, certainly not compared to Kat's complete lack of stable family life. And besides, I wasn't seeing my girlfriends quite as much as I usually had. I wasn't sure whose fault it was, but I blamed it on growing up, on having more to do than practice keg stands and beer bongs. When we did see each other, we just didn't have the same conversations that we used to—the ones that involved the minutiae of our lives. Instead, we got to the big points. We summarized.

And so I didn't mention that Thanksgiving scene with my mom, nor did I talk about that first scary phone call a few weeks later when she'd confided a sexual fantasy about Antonio Banderas. The barrage of alarming maternal confidences grew from there, one on top of the other, and I got used to internalizing them. Danny wasn't any help. College just made it easier for him to get pot, easier for him to avoid home and anything associated with it. I generally mentioned to Kat and Sin that my parents were having issues, but I never elaborated. I never told them how it kept me up nights, how I'd come to fear the ring of the phone. By the time I finally realized I should speak about it, that I
needed
to talk about it, John seemed the only good candidate. I'd slipped away from Kat and Sin, or they from me, and we all seemed too busy for the kind of analysis the conversation required.