The House in Amalfi (5 page)

“Shit, oh shit,” she moaned, “that’s all I need. . . .”

Still sobbing angrily, she slid from the car, hearing Bramble’s happy yap of greeting. Whenever she went out the dog would listen for the car and then come and wait by the door of the laundry room to be the first to greet her. He was older now and deaf and he didn’t always hear the car anymore, but tonight he was right there, as though he knew she was upset, and his anxious licks made her smile through her tears.

Matt was right behind him, holding open the door to the kitchen. He looked warily at her teary face. “I gather the Alex talk was not a great success.”

Jammy stood by the door, unable to move. “She didn’t want to believe me. She said I was a terrible woman to say such things about her perfect husband. She told me, ‘Please leave!’ She didn’t even say,
‘Get out!’
She was in this weird kind of control of herself, Matt, except when she swiped the martini glasses from the table and stomped the olives into that perfect black rug. God, there’s not even a cat hair in that
place. There’s no
life
there, Matt. And I love her and now I’ve blown our friendship, all because of that bastard Alex. Matt, oh, Matt, what am I to
do
?”

“Come here, honey.” He took her hand and led her gently inside. Bramble trotted anxiously next to them. In the kitchen, secure in her own world, Jammy sighed as Matt put his arms around her.

“Wait, Jam, that’s all you can do,” he said gently. “Wait until the truth sinks in. Wait and see what Lamour does then.”

The sound of the door slamming behind Jammy reverberated through the apartment. Then there was silence. A hard, ugly kind of silence. There was nothing alive in this apartment except me and only the dull thud of my heart to remind me of that.

My darling Alex
had
not
been a traitor. I told myself that over and over, as fat crystal balls of tears rolled down my cheeks and into the pillow. Alex loved me; I knew it. There had never been a wrong word between us. Besides, I would have known if there had been another woman. Or would I?

Oh,
damn
Jammy;
damn her.
How could she put these ideas in my mind? Alex was the perfect husband. We’d had the perfect life. Hadn’t we?

Doubt slid like a traitor into my golden memories. I recalled with sudden terrible clarity Alex’s frequent absences “on business,” his calls saying he’d be home late again, the cell-phone ring answered with a terse “yes” or “no,” and how he would suddenly have to return late to the office for some papers he’d forgotten. My thudding heart missed a beat as I recognized there was a pattern to Alex’s behavior. The pattern of a man involved in a secret love affair.

I got up and walked into my smart living room. I stood, staring bleakly at the familiar view from my bank of windows. I remembered how thrilled we had been with that view, one
of the best in Chicago, Alex had told me proudly when he’d first shown me the place. Alex had bought it without me even seeing it, which upset me at first—but “I knew you’d love it anyway,” he’d said. “How could you not? It’s a class act, baby, and just right for you.”

He was right of course, as he always seemed to be. Or perhaps it was that I just never questioned him. I was immersed in my work, my own separate life. Landscaping was my life; real estate development was Alex’s. I allowed him to make the decisions and went along with them. He rarely asked about my work and he never volunteered much information about his, except to say how busy he was with a big deal pending.

Alex always seemed to have “big deals” pending, which was why when he died it had come as a shock to find out that we were not rich after all. There was simply no money. His only asset was this apartment, which was in his name and on which there was a substantial first mortgage as well as a second. I knew Alex was a wheeler-dealer, and I had to assume that business had not been going well before he was killed. We’d always had a good lifestyle, though, good restaurants, good clothes. At least Alex had good clothes; I was never much of a shopper, and after all, when I worked, which was most of the time, I wore jeans and work boots with a T-shirt or a sweater.

I had a couple of pieces of decent jewelry: my engagement ring, a nice three-carat emerald-cut diamond chosen by Alex, nothing too huge because Alex said my hands were small and slender and anything bigger would have looked “flashy” on me; a pair of diamond studs that I wore every day and was so used to I hardly noticed anymore; and the gold Cartier tank watch he’d given me for a birthday. I had a string of those diamonds you buy “by the yard” at Tiffany’s. For a supposedly “rich” woman that was not much, I realized now.

In fact, Alex had not bought me any gift, not even flowers,
let alone jewelry, in a long time. For more than a year that I could recall, maybe even longer.

I sank back into despair. Alex couldn’t have been planning to marry someone else. I
refused
to believe it. I remembered when we had met, how he’d sought me out across a room filled with middle-aged socialites to whom I’d just given a lecture on the art of landscape gardening. Alex hadn’t attended the lecture; he’d been at a financial conference in the same hotel and had caught the last few minutes of my speech from the open door as he was passing.

“You were great,” he’d said, fixing me with those dark eyes. “I’m Alex Monroe. And I know who you are. And won’t you please have a drink with me.”

He’d led me to the bar and bought me champagne and it had simply taken off from there. With never a hitch, until he died.
And until now.

I stretched my weary body along the length of the Italian leather sofa, moaning softly. Jammy had been right: it
was
too hard. All for looks and nothing for comfort. Was that really the way I thought? Really the way my home was? Had Alex made me that way?

Confused, I sat up again. I sat for a long time on that smart, hard sofa, staring out the windows as night fell. Staring at the twinkling lights out along the lake, the little signals that life went on for some people. But not for me.

Self-pity overwhelmed my doubts and I began to cry again. I was truly a woman alone.

Despite the sofa’s hardness, I must have fallen asleep, because I awoke with the dawn, stiff and swollen eyed, filled with doubt.

I got up, took a shower, dressed, and went to visit my local police precinct.

I had never read the police report of the accident; I hadn’t been able to bear to see the details in print that made it all too real. Now I needed to know.

The kindly officer in charge summoned up the details on the computer and gave me a printout. The report said there were no other vehicles involved; Alex’s car had simply aquaplaned on the wet road and hit a tree. He was already pronounced dead and in the ambulance on his way to the hospital when the police finally reached me. Matt’s name and address were on the report, along with that of a woman listed under next of kin as “fiancée.” My own name had been added later, with the word “wife” after it.

So now I knew that what Jammy had said was true. There was no mystery about Alex’s death. The mystery had been his life. And I didn’t want to know about that anymore.

There was a weight like a lump of ice in my chest. Jammy and Matt, my friends, had tried to protect me from knowing about my cheating husband. They knew I would grieve for him, but they’d expected me to recover—slowly, it’s true—and that sooner or later I would pick up the threads of a normal life again. Instead, I had wasted two years grieving for a man who had been about to dump me for another woman.

Deceit is insidious; it crept around my heart, took over my mind, made me doubt my every moment spent with Alex.

I thought again about that elusive quality called happiness, about Jon-Boy and Rome. And about my long-neglected house in Amalfi. About finally facing my ghosts there.

I hurried back to the apartment. I was about to change my life completely. I called the real estate agent and told her to put the apartment on the market and that I wanted a fast sale. Then I called Jammy.

“When do we leave for Italy?” I said.

So here we are in Rome, just Jammy and me. I almost felt like that little girl again, stepping off the plane and driving into the Eternal City, past the monuments and ancient buildings, the grand avenues and the jumble of twisting little streets thronged with traffic and people. It all reminded me again why I loved this place. In most cities you need to go to a museum to discover its history, but in Rome you
live
with it. It’s on the streets where colossal crumbled statues lie where they have rested for centuries. It’s in the
fontanelle,
the drinking fountains carved into stone walls flowing with water from aqueducts built by the ancient Romans. It’s in the seven hills that make up the city and in the old churches, some splendidly ornate, decorated by a triumph of artists. And some deceptively simple, still used every day by the locals, and with sometimes an unexpected Michelangelo sculpture or a fresco by Raphael, a Torrite mosaic, or a Bernini fountain to make you gasp. It’s in the grand piazzas, like the Piazza Navona, layered higher and higher through the centuries to prevent flooding, though even as late as the eighteenth century it was still being frozen and used for winter ice skating. You live daily with history in sight of the great dome of St. Peter’s, as well as in the massive old plane trees that shade the streets and in the gossipy old cafés and the bars. There’s something in the air in Rome that I swear adds a skip of excitement to your step, the way it
used to when I was a kid, always expecting some new marvel, some new excitement just around the next corner.

Sadly, Matt could not make the trip with us—unforeseen business commitments, he’d said, though I suspect the truth was that he’d wanted Jammy to be the only one with me while I searched for my past. He’d been skeptical about my looking into Jon-Boy’s death, too.

“Listen, hon,” he’d said before we left, putting an arm around my shoulders and talking quietly. “It’s been what, twenty years now? Face it, Lamour; Jon-Boy just made a mistake; he went out on a boat and got caught in a storm. I don’t know; maybe he’d been drinking . . . a few too many glasses of grappa. . . .” He’d shrugged, knowing he hadn’t convinced me, even though I knew Jon-Boy had been partial to a few too many glasses of grappa, though I’d never seen him drunk. And he
never
went out on boats.

But now Jammy and I are at the Hotel d’Inghilterra, originally an old palazzo but since 1850 an intimate, antique-filled hotel on the via Bocca di Leone, right in the heart of Rome’s smartest shopping district.

“How convenient,” was Jammy’s appreciative comment as she sipped her first Roman espresso in the hotel restaurant, quaintly named the Lounge del Roman Garden.

Tired from the long flight, complete with all the usual air-travel delays, we went up to our pretty room, where we showered, then flung ourselves exhausted into bed. Soon I heard Jammy’s quiet snores. She had always snored, I remembered from childhood. But I found myself unable to sleep. Excitement and apprehension filled my mind. Was I going to find Trastevere the way I remembered it? Or had the memories been enhanced by time, the way they so often are?

Too much time had passed to find my lovely “grandmothers” still in Trastevere. I wondered who lived in our old
apartment now and whether if I knocked on their door and explained that I used to live there they might allow me to see it again. Just to breathe the same air that Jon-Boy and I had breathed together, smell that slightly musty air of a very old and rather decrepit building would bring back my memories.

Sleep was impossible. I could wait no longer. And besides, I needed to do this alone. I got up, dressed quickly, and with a last glance at the sleeping Jammy made my way downstairs into the suddenly quiet streets.

It was lunchtime and Rome had “closed down” for two or three hours. Only the sneakered, backpacking young still thronged the Piazza di Spagna, where I hailed a cab to take me to Trastevere.

My heart thumped from two jolts of espresso and nerves as each narrow traffic-clogged street brought me closer to my old home. When the cab finally dropped me off at the top of the vicolo del Cardinale, I gazed down its shadowy, empty length, unable for a moment even to move. A tall, slender man emerged from one of the apartments. Without looking my way, he strode off down the alley in the direction of the piazza. My heart skipped a beat. With his long dark hair and loping walk, it might have been Jon-Boy, out searching for me again, lost on my solitary ramblings.