Other People We Married (15 page)

Bobby took one look at his father and was off and running, one, two, three, straight into Jim’s arms. Charles thought it might be possible that things would have wound up differently, with Jim softening into imperfection; but watching him
with Bobby, whom he tossed into the air with all the passion of a ten-buck-an-hour babysitter, he doubted it.

Franny waded back out, leaving Charles alone in the water. It was warmer now, with the sun more directly overhead. He drifted backward to float on his back, his canvas-covered toes splaying out to the sides like wayward rudders. Charles watched as Franny tugged her swimsuit out of her bottom, adjusting herself for whatever Jim was about to say. She hadn’t washed her hair, or even brushed it, and even the wet parts were flattened at weird angles. The water moved Charles slowly back, back into the ocean. He wondered how long he could float before hitting something: a passing boat, Africa. His ears slipped above and below the surface, filling up with glugs and noises from the watery depths. Charles could have heard what they were saying to each other, but he didn’t. She’d tell him later, putting the emphasis on whatever she felt had been the most submissive, gentle thing Jim had said. In her version, she wouldn’t have had that look on her face, or the pouty lip, that much Charles knew for sure. Sometimes it was best to let people believe what they want to about themselves, especially Franny, who was held together with barbed wire and a thick coating of marshmallow fluff. One of the houses nearby had a flag up, nothing he recognized, some secret sailing message going out to the initiated, and it waved lazily in the wind.
You and me
, it was saying,
you and me
. Fuck them. Stay in the water.

Back at the office, they all said they’d had a great time. Franny had had the best time of all, of course. You could hear her laugh from anywhere in the office, even from Charles’s
desk, which was on the floor below. She would pull someone aside, anyone, it hardly mattered, and start to tell them a story in a whisper, but by the time she got to the end she’d be speaking at full volume, hoping to cull more listeners. Everyone liked to be singled out, and so by the end of the week, Franny had had special little tête-à-têtes with half the staff, including the cleaning ladies. Charles would walk by her in the hall on his way to the big color Xerox, and she and her big, red mouth would be performing something out of
Gypsy
, all for the benefit of Nena from Ecuador.

Usually, for lunch, they walked over to one of the delis with the enormous sandwiches. Sure, there were always tourists and flashbulbs, but the potato pancakes covered in sour cream and applesauce would make you forget. As her best friend, maybe Charles should have tried to help Franny watch her waistline, but he was still mad, having spent the five-hour drive back to the city listening to her laugh uproariously at Jim’s every syllable. He didn’t care if she ended up wearing bedsheets.

Charles ordered a cream soda and pastrami. Franny got the tuna, which he supposed was the diet choice on the menu, but they gave you so much of it that it was roughly equivalent to eating an entire jar of mayonnaise. The ancient waitresses stuck straws and pens in their aprons and made smacking sounds with their gigantic lipsticked mouths, pausing only to silently scold people when they ordered white bread instead of rye. Even when everything was in tip-top shape, though, and the rabble was behaving itself, they never moved very quickly. Perhaps they put that in the ad:
Must have wide hips and move like an elephant.

“I really am sorry about Jim.” Franny’s mouth stretched open to jam in a corner of her sandwich. The flimsy pieces of bread on the top and bottom of the tuna fish bowling ball didn’t stand a chance, nor did Franny’s skirt, which acted as an impromptu safety net for falling pieces of wet, salty fish.

“As in, sorry you married a bigot?” He plunked a fallen piece of pastrami into his mouth and washed it down. “Or, like, sorry I had to hear it?”

She gave him a look. A round tourist and his equally round wife jostled past their table, no, toward their table, and sat down at the adjacent two seats, which put them about three centimeters away from Franny’s and Charles’s elbows.

“No, like, sorry he was such an asshole. I really mean it.” Fran had stopped eating and had her hands clasped in front of her chest. “When he married me, he married you, you know what I mean? He shouldn’t have said it, simple as that.”

Their neighbors to the left were from Germany. The husband had a Minolta around his neck on a bright yellow strap, all the easier for the thieves to spot. His wife held the map. Charles wondered if she thought she would still need it, to find the bathroom or maybe her way out. He almost couldn’t believe they were there—the second-most famous Jewish deli in the city. Some kind of reparations, he supposed.
Oh, fräulein, let’s order the pastrami and set things right.
They were dressed in somewhat archetypal tourist fashion—shorts and hiking boots, but with knotted sweaters tied around their shoulders, should a chill appear later in the day. No doubt they had umbrellas in their rucksacks. Charles imagined he and Franny dressed up like that, with baseball hats and thick socks, tromping around some foreign place, their sunglasses
too large for their faces. She would hold the map, and he would paint her portrait in a thousand tiny towns. Charles looked across the table and smiled. Fran returned the smile, her mouth open and wide, with beige flecks of tuna wedged in between almost every tooth. She was a total wreck, and he loved every inch of her. He wasn’t her husband, or her son, or her officemate. Charles got the sunny side of her, the good face; the best bits were always for
him.

L
aura and Stephen were set up by their therapist. It was after they’d both quit going to their bereavement support groups, and didn’t seem any weirder than being set up by your divorce lawyer, which had happened to a couple of Laura’s girlfriends. Rose suggested they meet at a Starbucks, somewhere public, where hostility and anger weren’t allowed. Laura picked the one closest to her job at the magazine; she often saw blind dates take place there, nervous conversations with too much talk about the exes. It was the working girl’s way of multitasking, screening potential suitors on their lunch breaks. She picked an empty table with a view of the street and kept her sunglasses on so that she could scrutinize all the single men with impunity. Three were bald, which would have been fine. One had glasses and a weedy frame—surely that was him; she’d described John to Rose. Would she
send her a replacement husband, as though John had been an ill-fitting sweater, finally swapped for the correct size?

One guy looked like a quarterback and began wandering around in between the tables after buying his Venti latte. She watched him circle the other tables of single women, who stayed focused on their laptops. He was tall, over six feet, and looked like the kind of boy who’d had lots of girlfriends in high school. He had probably been on the lacrosse team, or soccer, something sun-kissed and surrounded by cheering fans. It had never rained where he grew up, she just knew it. Laura slid her sunglasses to the top of her head.

“Stephen?” she said, sure that she would be speaking into thin air, that the quarterback would shake his head and probably laugh when he got outside. Laura wasn’t unattractive, she knew, but hers was a subtler kind: unplucked eyebrows and sensible footwear.

He looked startled, like a baby next to a popped balloon just before the tears started to flow. But then the momentary look of panic was gone, so absent, in fact, that Laura was sure she’d imagined it. “Laura?” he said. Stephen was already smiling when he slid into the seat across from her, as easily as if she and everyone else at the Starbucks had somehow wandered into his living room.

“Looks that way,” Laura said. Her hair felt even more brown that usual, like mouse fur or dry dirt. “Hi.” At least it was long again. After John died, she’d chopped all her hair off, up to her ears. Her mother said she looked like Joan of Arc, who Laura thought probably didn’t have a mirror. It had not been a compliment.

“Nice to meet you,” Stephen said. His teeth were beautiful
products of adolescent orthodontia: straight and well spaced. Rose hadn’t mentioned the teeth. In fact, Rose hadn’t mentioned anything, other than that Stephen, too, had lost his wife and was chafing at the uniformity of the (aged, female) participants of the bereavement group he’d been attending. She definitely hadn’t mentioned his shoulders, or his lion’s mane, which crested and cooed at Laura as though it had a voice all its own, each blond curl telling her why this couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t work.

Laura had been to Rome before, some ten years previous, with John. They hadn’t yet married, but the trip, in the honeymoon of their relationship, was overflowing with the kind of romance that nauseates fellow travelers with all its public kisses and fondling. But that was a long time ago, and Laura felt almost certain she was ready to go back. After all, Rome had been around for centuries and centuries without her, and without John, and surely it wouldn’t bear the mark of his loss. She would have to do that alone, and hope that Rome didn’t recognize the scar and offer her damp, sorry weather in return. If she wasn’t ready now, then she might never be, and better to try than to stay home with the cat.

After pushing for a Roman holiday for several months, Stephen was excited and booked a room in a boutique hotel on the piazza in front of the Pantheon. It was a small building, only five stories high, with only two hotel rooms per floor. They were on the very top. Outside their window, the dome of the Pantheon arched gracefully into the sky, until the roof itself opened up, as though the two couldn’t stand to be apart a moment longer. The hotel was expensive, more
than five hundred dollars a night, but Stephen paid happily. He’d been rich his whole life and found the idea of money rather embarrassing. In truth, the room probably cost even more than he had admitted.

The hotel clerk had one good eye, one bad. The one on the left looked at them, and the one on the right examined the crown molding. He explained to them the concept of the elevator. They tried to catch the good eye and nod, letting him know they understood.

“The door—the door, yes?” He pointed, jabbing a short finger in the direction of the elevator shaft. Laura and Stephen nodded in unison. “The door close, or elevator no move. Door close. Must close!” He wagged the finger again, for emphasis. “Must close!” The good eye narrowed; he doubted them already. His finger looked like an Italian sausage, full of red bloody specks. He must have been in his midseventies; Laura wondered what he was doing there. Even if he owned the hotel, surely there was a son, a grandson, someone who could do this for him. The good eye found her staring and forced her into retreat. Laura shuffled with her bags into the small cabin of the elevator, repeating what he had said. “We’ll close the door, we’ll close it, I promise,” she said. Stephen ducked in just before the door began to shut.

After showering off the remains of the recycled air of the airplane, they decided a walk was in order. It was a Saturday, and sunny if not warm, a perfect day to explore a new city. Stephen, for all of his traveling, had never made it to Rome, an oversight he’d spent the last three months planning to correct. He was armed with books and lists and maps and tickets
to the Borghese. His digital camera was brand-new and could hold five hundred photos.

“Do you want some coffee? Some cappuccino? I hear it’s good here,” he said. Stephen put his hand around her waist and tugged her closer to him. Laura’s hair pulled slightly under his grip. “Whaddya say? You hungry?”

Laura shrugged. There was a cool breeze coming through the street, bouncing off the stone walls. She didn’t remember there being so much stone. “I could have some cappuccino. Why not, right? It’s still morning, isn’t it?”

“If not here, then somewhere.” He kissed the top of her head, sending her chin into his shoulder with a clunk. Stephen looked ahead, beaming, while Laura detangled herself and gave her face a rub.

It was in fact already noon, and by the time they’d been walking for half an hour, the smell of lunch was too seductive to ignore, pouring heavily out of doors and windows. According to the guidebooks, lunch could be a three-course meal, even for real Italians. Laura’s stomach began to growl; she could hear it over the din of the mopeds and the buses and the tourists.

“Let me see the book. What are we close to?” she said.

Stephen dutifully dug one of the guidebooks out of his coat pocket and handed it over.

“Do those look like tortoises? On that fountain? I think we’re here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map. “What does that mean in terms of my stomach?” Laura flipped the page. Stephen leaned in and looked over her shoulder. On the fountain behind them, enormous stone turtles—tortoises,
although she wouldn’t have known the difference if the book hadn’t told her—were climbing out of the water basin.

“Ah, I know where we are. Here, right, let’s go, fried artichokes.” Some part of her had known where she was going, the heel of her left foot, maybe, or the tip of her nose. Something remembered.

Stephen spun around on his heels, looking up for street signs. “Right,” he said, “this way.”

“I know it’s that way, I just said so.” Laura shut the book and tucked it in her bag, walking ahead down the narrow sidewalk.

The Jewish Ghetto was something Laura hadn’t expected to find twice in Rome, not by accident. After all, Rome was Catholic, what with the Pope a stone’s throw and all those churches, churches, churches. But she and John had found it, just like this, tripping along the tiny little streets with unwieldy maps protruding from their bags and blisters growing happily on their toes. It had been summertime, the middle of August, when rates were cheaper and everything seemed so ripe it was bound to spoil. They had been on this street, D’Ottavia, she remembered it now. Looking back, all these little streets had run together, all the piazzas had become one enormous open space, all with olive-skinned teenagers necking like crazy, and them, too—they hadn’t been so much older. They had held hands on every one of these streets, kissed fingers and necks and cheeks across tables at the nicest restaurants they could afford, which weren’t really very nice at all, but they didn’t care. John had always loved to kiss her in public, something that Laura couldn’t imagine anymore, feeling so strongly about the
inside of someone else’s mouth that she wouldn’t mind irritating the people around her.