Roman Crazy (7 page)

I paused as the cab pulled up in front of Daisy's apartment, surprised we were already here. She paid, we climbed out, and she nodded for me to continue as we made our way into the courtyard and up the stairs.

“I landed in Barcelona and it was—I was a mess. Like I was when I got here. Excited but exhausted. Eager but nervous as all hell. I was alone for the first time in my life and truly responsible for
me.
”

“How'd you meet him? I mean, he's a few years older than us and he wouldn't have been in your program,” she said, turning her key into the lock and letting us inside. “You want anything to drink?” I shook my head, heading straight for the couch, while she made for the comfy armchair.

“He wasn't. We met by accident. One of my classes was canceled and I had time to kill so I went exploring,” I explained, remembering the dog-eared travel book and map I brought over with me. “I'd flip a coin and just venture off on my own. I'd leave the map and take off with no plan and just enough money to get me back to the apartment safely if I ended up truly lost. That only happened once, and that was the day I met him.”

Daisy settled into the chair, relaxing back and resting her head on her hand as she listened intently. There was a stack of notepaper on the end table, along with a stubby pencil. I picked them both up and began to doodle a bit as I thought back to the day we met. Unbidden, my fingers began to sketch out the hillside where I first saw him.

“You've been to Barcelona; did you ever make it to Park Güell?” She nodded. “I hit the top of the Carmel Hill and I just fell in love with the city. I sat, leaning against the steps just trying to catch my breath from the climb and think about what I wanted to sketch when a few guys came around the corner.”

My Spanish was a bit rusty, so a lot of their back-and-forth was lost on me, but I knew they were asking me to join them for a drink. I shook my head, thanking them. Marcello was toward the back of the group and was lingering the way a boy does when he wants to talk to a girl away from his friends.

They all spotted a group of girls and took off down the hill, leaving the two of us alone with the rest of the tourists.

“Are you busy?” he asked in Spanish, motioning to my sketchbook, but he had already sat beside me on the steps. “Can I join you? I promise not to interrupt,” he tried this time in what I thought was Catalan.

He repeated everything in Italian, and finally . . .

“Yes,” I responded with a smile when he said it in English.

“And . . .” Daisy said, pulling me out of my thoughts. She leaned in, arms resting on the counter. “This is playing out like a romantic movie in my head. Keep going.”

I continued, telling her how he introduced himself with a handshake and so much charisma and swagger that he charmed me in an instant. We chatted for a bit. It was easy, innocent. I had these preconceived notions on how he would be. You hear
about the European men and how flirty and pushy they are, but this guy—I felt a smile creep in at the memory of that day—this guy was just cute and chill and charming and somehow totally interested in this wide-eyed American.

We discovered that we were both at University of Barcelona. I told him about Boston and my hopes to get a better position at the Museum of Fine Art until I could find a job as a restorer. He was in a master's program in architecture, so we could have gone the entire semester never seeing each other if it wasn't for that canceled class.

What I didn't mention was Daniel. It didn't even occur to me to say, “Oh hey, by the way, I've sort of got this boyfriend back home . . .” I didn't expect for us to see each other again let alone become what we did.

As I spoke I shaded and contoured the sketch with different sides of the pencil.

Daisy studied me with wide eyes. “Holy shit. I've got this odd sense of pride and yet I'm sort of irked. Mostly because, hello? Best friend!”

“I didn't just keep it from you,” I defended, lining the outer edges boldly so they stood out against the white paper. I swept my thumb across the clouds, the skyline, and smudged the cobblestones.

“I can't believe you never told anyone.”

“I sort of did. At least I did without actually saying anything. Remember how I went dark? No emails, no texts, calls, I think maybe I sent a postcard or two.”

“Wait,
he
was why no one ever heard from you? When you got home, you said the courses were tough.”

“That wasn't a lie. They were tough. Because I was skipping a lot of them. My grades suffered. His weren't so hot, either.” I
suddenly heard myself, and laughed out loud. “I can't believe I'm sitting here, in Rome no less, I'm about to get a divorce, and I'm chatting it up with you about my grades nine years ago! What is happening?” I laughed again, and even to my own ears I sounded a bit delirious. “And now Marcello is suddenly back in the picture and—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, just hold on a minute here.” She held up her hands. “Back in the picture? Just because you're both here doesn't mean you're going to fall back into bed with him. Does it?”

Did it?
“No, of course not,” I responded weakly.

T
HE LAST TIME I
was in europe, I survived on almost no sleep. It was easy, I was young and excited to be on my own for the first time. I wasn't going to miss a thing. My life back then, at least in the beginning, was all about the art, the energy of Barcelona—full immersion. Any and every medium imaginable was used to create what I thought were masterpieces—sleep just got in the way.

Of course it was different this time around. I was weary and heartbroken and more than a little bit embarrassed, which led to a lot of anger. As if those weren't enough feelings jockeying for position in my head, I just faced someone whose life I disappeared from without a trace.

Last night after Daisy fell asleep curled up on the chair, I covered her up with a throw blanket and headed back to the guest room. Exhausted, I stretched out, propped myself up on pillows, and stared at the veined plaster ceiling trying to memorize every detail from the dinner.

Marcello.

I fell asleep thinking of him, something I hadn't done in years.

I WOKE UP THE NEXT
morning to church bells pealing like crazy, telling me, and everyone else nearby, that it was time to wake up and start the day.

I'd start the day, but that didn't mean I had to get out of bed. Pulling the pillows over my head, I burrowed down into the mattress, praying for the bells to stop. They didn't. Admittedly, they sounded lovely. I just wish they weren't so damn loud.

Ding, dong, ding.
I flung the pillow at the window and nearly cried when it hit the wooden slatted shades, opening them up. Sunlight poured into the room, warming it in its beautiful Italian glow.

“Damn it,” I muttered to myself, hiding my head under the blankets. Checking my watch, I calculated the time difference between Rome and Boston. A pang struck deep in my belly at the thought that Daniel would be finishing up his Sunday golf game and heading home, where we would have carried on with our routine pleasantries.

Yet here I was lying in a bed that wasn't mine, in a city that I was a stranger in when my life as I knew it was carrying on without me in Boston. I felt a subtle itch to call Daniel. To ask him when he'd be home so that I made sure everything was just
so.
Straightening artwork that I didn't paint and setting the dining room table with china that wasn't mine—these were all parts of a whole.

Or, a
hole
as it were, because there was a gaping one in our marriage and it took me going to another country to accept just how far apart we had grown.

Daisy knocked and poked her arm through the open door and jiggled a bag filled with something that smelled outrageously good. And fattening. Mmm, trans fat and cholesterol.

I burrowed further into the blankets.

“No more snoring, cupcake. Time to get up and kick the rest of the jet lag in the ass. Oh, and finish filling in the blanks, please,” she said, laughing and sitting on the edge of the bed. “I'd prefer not to pry it out of you.” She rolled her neck and grimaced. “I have a crick in my neck from sleeping in that chair all night.”

“I did cover you with a blanket,” I pointed out, reaching for the bag of pastries.

“You did; it's nice to have someone tucking me in for a change. I've been swamped with this job, not sleeping too much. Still, I know better than to sleep in that damn chair; I shouldn't have gotten comfortable. Henry Cavill could've been doing a striptease for me and I'd still probably have fallen asleep.”

“Oh please, there's no way in hell you would have slept through that.”

“Well, that's true,” she replied with a faraway look in her eye. No doubt thinking of a dancing Henry.

“What's this job, anyway?” I asked, sitting up and pulling a pillow onto my lap. I smoothed my blond hair back, feeling how knotted up the back had gotten while I slept. Plucking a tie from the side table, I pulled it up, wrapping it into a loose bun.

Sitting on the bed and chatting felt like we were back in college. Daisy looked the same, save for the hair. She was still tall and lean, probably from all the walking she did here, and her green eyes sparkled when she talked about work.

“It's this old bank we've been working on for months. It's
almost
done, but we hit a snag. One of the volunteers found out
she was pregnant and she can't be in the studio or around the chemicals anymore. Even though we're environmentally friendly, it's a lot of funk when your senses are on overdrive.”

“That's too bad. Is that going to mess up the schedule?”

She sighed, flipping through messages on her phone. “Yeah, it's not great. The volunteers, well you know, they make or break a job sometimes. Especially with tight funding. We moved someone else down there to pick up some of the slack, but now we're short someone to replaster some of the Romanesque vases that we found.”

“I like plaster.”

“You like plaster?” she repeated, confused.

I nearly bit my lip to take back what I'd said, but then I thought about it. The instinct was right, I had the training, why couldn't I help out? “I've got experience. I mean, as recently as a few years ago at least. And it's in exactly this kind of work, restoring Romanesque vases.”

She was quiet for a minute, wheels turning. “You're serious. Oh my God, you're serious? This is the best!” She catapulted her lanky body and landed on me, squeezing my neck. “It's nothing major—not that you couldn't totally handle major, but it's just a vase. Well, vases, as in plural. This is kick ass; you know that, right? We can go to work together. You can . . . oh—”

“Oh what? Oh no or oh yes? Let's still focus on the yes!”

She pulled away, sitting back on her haunches with her phone clutched in her hand. “It's at my office. We've got a restoration studio there and . . .”

“And?” I said, not seeing a problem with me coming to volunteer some time in her office and . . . oh.

“Marcello,” we said together.

She shook her head like crazy after thinking a minute.
“You know what? I'll talk to him tomorrow. It'll be fine. The work area is on the first floor and he's way up on five, you'd hardly even run into each other. Maybe. Probably.”

I nodded, not feeling at all as hopeful and excited as I was a minute ago. Would this work? Would he be okay with this? The idea of helping out in my field, even in a small way, was an exciting prospect. Something that I hadn't felt in a long time.

Back home in Boston, whenever I thought about what I was missing out on by choosing to stay at home and not work in my field, I bottled it up. It didn't matter that I was good, really good, at what I'd studied, what I'd worked toward all those years. I'd made a choice, and when I made that choice I knew full well what I was deciding.

But still . . . the instinct lingered. I'd been in Rome twenty-four hours and I was throwing my hat into the Romanesque vase ring without a second thought because it just
felt right.
Even just to volunteer, it was something.

“Oh, I almost forgot!” Daisy scrambled off the bed and dashed back into the other room, snapping me back from my own thoughts. When she returned, she looked very proud of herself. “I brought you some coffee to go with your pastry. I wanted you good and sugared up for the rest of the story.”

“The story?” I asked, taking the coffee and giving it a taste test. Mmm . . .

“The story, she asks,” she said to herself, rolling her eyes. “The story! You! Marcello! The Love That Ate Barcelona! I gotta hear the rest!”

I laughed in spite of myself, glad she was getting such a kick out of my long-ago love affair. “Sure, sure, that story. Where'd I stop?”