One Italian Summer(36)
“Hm?”
“He’s a fucking idiot if he let you come here by yourself.”
I stop. I put a hand to my forehead. “I didn’t give him a choice,” I say.
“Bullshit,” Adam says. And then he’s gone.
Chapter Seventeen
I sleep in phases, my REM cycles punctuated by the images of Adam’s body close to mine, and the waning effects of all that alcohol. As the sun rises the next morning I call Eric from the room phone. I have a coffee next to me, and the robe from the room tucked around me. For the first time since I arrived in Positano, there’s a slight chill in the air.
It’s 6 a.m. in Positano, which means it’s 9 p.m. in Los Angeles. As the phone rings I imagine Eric preparing for bed, taking a glass of water into the bathroom, spitting the Crest blue into the sink. Or is he downstairs, with a beer, watching a sport he doesn’t follow on television?
The phone rings. Once, twice, three times, but no one answers. Our voicemail doesn’t even pick up, which happens if the machine is full or the phone is off the hook. I swallow. Is he going to work, talking to his family, seeing my dad? Or has he decided in my absence that I was right? That in fact he’s not waiting for me to come home, for me to decide. That he’s finished, too.
Two weeks after we moved into the Culver City house, Eric had to go on a business trip. Normally, I’d have spent the week at my parents’ house, but I was finishing up a big commercial assignment for work that was on a tight deadline, and I decided to stay put.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay all by yourself there?” my mother asked.
“I’m twenty-seven,” I said. “I should be able to spend the night in my own home alone.”
“You don’t have to, though,” my mother said.
I must have been alone growing up—I was an only child, after all—but I never remember it. My mother was always there. She was my mother and my friend and my sibling, all at once.
That first night Eric was gone, I armed the alarm to the house and locked the bedroom door. But the next night I forgot. By the third, I was falling asleep on the couch to a movie, the windows wide open.
“You stayed here the whole week by yourself?” Eric said when he got back. His suitcase was dropped by the door. He was incredulous. I don’t think he had believed me on the phone.
“Yes.”
He kissed me, and then he angled me toward the couch, my makeshift bed.
We had sex downstairs there, on the floor of the living room, something we never did. I remember feeling sexy, independent. I had missed having that much time to myself, or rather, I’d never had it. And I liked it. When I looked back on that week, I remember thinking it was one of the happiest I’d had. I didn’t know what that said about my marriage. Whether it was Eric’s absence or return that made me feel that way.
Adam isn’t there when I go down to breakfast, my hangover screaming, nor is he there when I finish (toast; fruit; black, black coffee) and wave to Marco and Nika, who seem to be in a heated discussion on the balcony. Today the itinerary upstairs says Capri, but what I really want to do is find Carol. Last I left her, she was in the street, dancing up to her pensione. I’m going to track her down this morning.
I climb the steps outside the hotel and try to follow the path to where she split off from me the other morning. I get to the landing. There is still a haze over town today. I’m comfortable in a T-shirt, but I’ve just been up fifty flights of stairs.
I look around me, trying to figure out where to start my search, when the stupidity of this plan hits me. I never knew the name of the street she lived on, just that she lived in a pensione near the Hotel Poseidon. The hotel was the marker. I have no idea where her room is, or where to begin looking.
There is a wraparound stone bench in this little square, and I take a seat. I watch an older couple drink coffee on the stoop. Two men pass by in bike shorts and tank tops.
I wait. I’m certain that if I just stay here, she’ll emerge, present herself the way she has before. The way she did yesterday morning. That she’ll spill out into the piazza and stumble into my life once again. But ten minutes pass by, then fifteen, then thirty, and I don’t see her.
The boats on the water bob contentedly. I think about last night with Adam. The memory feels like it belongs to someone else. It could not possibly have been me, dancing in that club. It could not possibly have been me, straddling a stranger by an Italian pool. Was it?
Carol and Chuck Silver loved Halloween. I think my mother, more, and my father just went along. They’d go all out—decorated house; haunted pathway up to the front door; spooky, voice-activated welcome mat; window decals, the whole thing. And their costumes were always over-the-top, too. My mom would go to Rhonda (a seamstress for my dad) in August and start planning. Their costumes were always classic, never topical. Carol Silver did not watch a lot of television. They dressed up as Count Dracula and Countess, The Wizard of Oz gone wrong, and Anne of Bloody Gables (my personal favorite). My mother loved passing out candy to all the neighborhood children.
Eric and I tried to do something similar at our house the past few years, but it always felt pointless. She was doing it better; we may as well go over there. So we did. She could transform her home and herself like no one else in the whole neighborhood.
After forty-five minutes, I concede she’s not going to show and that it’s time to head back. I go downstairs slowly, stopping a few times to take in the view from different vantage points.