Chapter Twenty-two

            I CALLED MIRANDA AND ASKED HER TO LOOK AFTER Donny Most for a few more days, and told her I wouldn’t need the pickup at Logan airport after all.

            “Of course it’s okay,” she said. “How come, though?”

            “Would you believe I ran into an old friend here? Talk about a small world…”

            I called Jeff and told him my flight had been cancelled, and the only other one I could get was in three days.

            “Really?” The way he said this implied, Are you honestly going to give me an excuse that lame?

            “Um…” I answered.

            “That’s what I thought,” he said.

            “Would you believe I ran into an old friend here?”

            “More than I would the cancelled flight, yeah.”

            “Talk about a small world.”

            “Just make sure you get back by Wednesday. The second Shakespeare candidate is coming to interview, and you’re in charge of picking her up at the airport as well as attending the teaching demo.”

            “Yeah, I know. I’ll be back by then, I promise.”

            Jeff briefed me on other agenda items before wishing me a safe flight home. “You sound good, by the way. Refreshed.”

            I called my mother and told her I was staying a few extra days and offered her no explanation whatsoever. Then I called Maggie.

            “You are never going to believe this,” I started.  Then I told her.

            “I don’t believe it!”

            “I’m staying on a few extra days with him.”

            “You slept with him, didn’t you. Tell me you slept with him. Of course you slept with him—I can hear it in your voice.”

            “I screamed ‘Yes’ in two different languages.”

            “Oh, Andi, I am so happy for you! This was meant to be. You’ll see.”

            “Don’t start planning another wedding, Mags. This is just Italy. Who knows what’s going to happen once we get back to Boston? In fact, I don’t know if I even want anything to happen once we’re back.”

            “Don’t worry about that now, Cupcake. Enjoy the rest of Rome with Devin.”

            “Actually, he insists on being called ‘David’ now. And really, he is. David, I mean. It still takes some getting used to.”

            “Just be sure you call him when you get back to the States.”

            “Oy, Maggie…”

            That afternoon, after touring yet another museum, we sat outside a café drinking cappuccinos. I scribbled a line in my journal.

            “So what have you been writing all this time?” David asked.

            “Well, I’ve been trying to make sure I’ve captured every aspect of the experience, for one thing. I think a good memoir could come out of this. For another thing, I’ve been jotting new ideas for Sam’s eulogy.”

            “Come again?”

            “I’ve been revising Sam’s eulogy.”

            “What for?”

            Funny—no one, including myself, had ever bothered to ask me that question, and I paused to find the answer. He didn’t wait for it, though. “Did you deliver the eulogy at his funeral?” he asked, sounding perplexed.

            “Of course.”

            “I guess I just assumed that you’d have been too distraught and someone else would have done it, like a relative or a best friend.”

            I shuddered in shame at the memory. “I had insisted on doing it myself.”

            “Must have been something spectacular.”

            “It was crap, actually.”

            “The funeral?”

            “No, the eulogy. It was a piece of crap. Total shit. A dead skunk stinks less than that eulogy.”

            “Come on, Andi—it couldn’t have been that bad.”

            “If it could’ve, it would’ve cremated itself.”

            “What happened?”

            “I was so shocked by his death, so devastated by the whole thing, I couldn’t think straight. I was in a haze for days. I barely remember the funeral at all, much less writing anything remotely close to a eulogy. I just remember looking down at the words on the page and suddenly realizing I was going to have to read this shit out loud. I would’ve been better off reciting one of his favorite poems or reading from a book. Hell, I would’ve been better off doing a clog-dance at that point. Unfortunately, I didn’t have such wisdom in the moment. I never should have done it. I never should have insisted.”

            “I’m sure people understood. I’m sure no one was expecting more.”

            “Are you kidding? They all were. You were, just now. I was. Sam was. What an injustice, to write and then deliver such a piece of crap. I might as well have spit on his dead body.”

            “I think you’re being a little too hard on yourself,” he said.

            I shook my head. “I’m not being hard enough. I keep revising it in the hopes that I can have a memorial and deliver it there, or have it published someplace, or something. I don’t know.”

            This time David shook his head. “You make it sound like it was all about you. Like you wanted the glory. Besides, it’s not going to make up for the moment you lost. It’s not going to make up for the fact that he abandoned you. Isn’t that what you’re really trying to control?”

            I took a sip of my cappuccino, feeling irked. “You channeling my shrink or something?”

He didn’t respond.

“You know, I just thought of something. Why didn’t you deliver the eulogy at your father’s funeral?” I asked.

            “No one asked me to.”

            “Would you have if they did?”

            “In a New York minute.”

            I paused for a beat. “Why didn’t you offer?”

            “Are you forgetting what it was like for me back then? Most of my family wasn’t speaking to me. My dad and I had spent a lifetime not speaking to each another. What could I have said at that point? How receptive would they have been?”

            “I don’t think you would’ve done it if they had asked. I think you would’ve said no. I think you’re feeling the same as me—that if given the chance now, you would do it.”

            He finished his cappuccino. “Well, it’s not gonna happen, so why dwell on it?”

            “Why not write one now?”

            “I wrote something when I was doing a column for the Boston Leisure Weekly. In fact, I revised the memoir I had written under your tutelage and added to it, and published it near the anniversary of his death. So in a way, I suppose I got my chance.”

            “Well, good for you.”

            He looked taken aback. “What’s with the attitude all of a sudden?” 

            I stood up and left the café. It had grown cloudy—the first cloudy day since I’d been there. He followed me.

            “Man, I hate when you do this,” he said, trying to catch up.

            “Do what?”

            “The minute something or someone pushes one of your insecurity buttons, you take it out on everyone around you.”

            “Better than what you do,” I said, increasing my pace. “You rationalize it away and smooth it over. Why can’t you just admit that you’re not perfect?”

            He stopped in his tracks. “Me? You’re the perfectionist! You don’t try a single thing that is beyond your comfort zone. And for you, ‘comfort’ is synonymous with ‘familiar.’ If you don’t know what it is, you avoid it like the plague, and then you have a panic attack that someone is going to find out what you don’t know.”

            I stopped walking too. “Look, I’m not the one who refused to have sex with women for money and claimed it was for their benefit. I’m not the one who fucked a former client to get a book deal—no, wait…sorry—you fucked her in gratitude of the book deal. I’m not the one who waited until my father was on his deathbed before I made peace with him. Don’t tell me about being evasive.”

            He looked wounded. Dammit, how did we always get to this place, even seven years later?

A gust of wind blew in our path. Suddenly tired, I walked over to a bench and sat on it, putting my head into my hands. Moments later, David joined me. I picked my head up. We stared out ahead and didn’t look at each other.

            “I’m sorry, Dev.” David, I thought.

            “Me too.”

            “Why do we do this to one another? Why do we hurt each other like this?”

            “Because we know each other so well.”

            Do we? I wanted to ask.

            “I don’t mean to do it, you know,” I said.

            “I know you don’t. Neither do I.”

            “I guess I just hate it because you’re right all the time. Even back then you were.”

            “So are you,” he said. “At least when it comes to me.”

We watched a boy and girl playing together in the distance.

“Was Sam always right?” he asked.

            “Not always. Thing is, when Sam was wrong, he was so sweet about admitting it that you couldn’t feel good about being right.”

            “No gloating, huh.”

            “Never.” I smiled. For the first time, the memory didn’t feel quite as cutting as usual. “That was okay, though. We had such good makeup sex that it didn’t matter who was right or wrong in the end.”

            “Makeup sex rocks,” he said. At that point, we looked at each other and laughed. And for a moment, I could tell we were both contemplating it for ourselves. But our faces softened, and instead David took my hand and held it. We sat on that bench for at least an hour, silent, holding hands, watching the little boy and girl playing together.

***

            I moved into David’s hotel room for the remainder of my stay in Rome. We spent it walking around the city, going to galleries and shops and trattorias, and taking a drive along the countryside. I was definitely going to miss the scenery and scents and siestas. David was right about Italy being life-affirming. I finally understood what he meant about finding my soul here. The Italians celebrated life and all its pleasures in such a way that one’s own life and spirit and passions could not be help but be validated and awakened.

On our last night in Rome, I stood on the balcony of the hotel room in an oversized terrycloth robe and looked out at the city stretched out before me. David, in an identical robe, came out and put his arms around me from behind, and I let myself fall back into the safety of his body.

            “Bellisima,” I said, feeling a chill from the breeze. He must have felt it too, and gave me a squeeze. “I don’t want to leave here.”

            “La Bella Italia—she’ll wait for your return,” he said.

That instant, I turned around.

“Take me back to Fontana Di Trevi!”

He looked at me, surprised. “Now? It’s late.”

“Please? Take me—I need to go there!”

“Okay.”

We hastily dressed and left. Other late-night dwellers strolled around the city and lingered by the fountain. I took out three Euros. Without my asking him to, David left me alone. I looked at the coins, momentarily overwhelmed, not knowing what to wish for. But Sam’s presence was so strong, as if he was standing, breathing next to me. And this time, it didn’t leave me aching for him; rather, it made me feel peaceful, not alone. And I even wondered at that moment if Sam had brought me back to Devin—David, or brought David back to me.

I didn’t make a wish, exactly. More like, I left a message.

How I love you, Sam. I love you so much and I’ll never really leave you. I am so grateful that you bought these tickets for us and wanted us to have this adventure. That you wanted this for me. You gave me this gift.

And then it came to me.

I wish to dare to envision a life without you, Sam. A different life from the one I wanted with you, I mean.

The coins made a faint plink-plunk sound as they hit the water and sunk to the bottom, rippling in darkness. At that instant, a weight lifted itself from my heart. I felt warm inside, as if Sam was whispering, “Okay, Sweetheart. You can go home now.” As if he gave me his blessing.

I walked over to where David was standing. My eyes glistened.

“Ready to go?” he asked. I nodded.

“Let’s go home,” I said. We left the fountain, arm in arm.