The Rome Affair. Laura Caldwell
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old rail line, the top of which now served as a planter for trees and bushes and, quite often, an impressively charming display of weeds. On the other side, a few turn-of-the-century bungalows, like ours, mixed with large, single-family homes built in the past five years.
Many Chicago residents knew nothing of Bloomingdale Avenue. After living in the city for years myself, I’d never seen it. But Nick and I took a walk one day during our engagement. We were tired and nervous about getting everything done before the wedding, and we wanted to simply be outside. It was chilly but sunny that autumn day, and we ambled this way and that, talking about the wedding and our jobs and our family and who to seat next to whom. At some point, we stumbled onto Bloomingdale, and with the sun striking orange through the trees, it seemed an enchanted avenue.
There was a For Sale sign in front of a white bungalow that had a wide front porch and a cedar-shake roof. The street and the house were like nothing we’d ever seen before, but we looked at each other and we nodded. It was as if we knew. We called a real estate agent as soon as we got home. We closed on the house a month later, just in time for our wedding.
Nick turned into the alley and parked in the garage behind our house.
He took my hand, and I followed him through our tiny back garden, just starting to bloom with daffodils, and up the wooden back stairs into the house. Nick switched on lights as he led me through the kitchen with its wood-and-glass cupboards, original to the house, and down into the basement.
It was dark on the stairs. “Nick?” I said, almost faltering as I followed him halfway down.
“Okay, stay here.” His hand slipped from mine, and I was gripped with sudden fear.
Then light flooded the basement. I blinked. This was not our dank basement with boxes of discarded clothes and books and my painting table set up into one tiny corner. This was an entirely new room.
I hurried down the steps and ran my hands over the walls—once gray cement but now papered a pleasing sage-green. I stared at the floors, which were now covered with straw matting, on top of which sat an Oriental carpet in tones of orange and green. A bookshelf rested against the left wall, filled with my art books. The fluorescent strips no longer hung from the ceiling. Instead, a globe pendent provided a warm glow. Against the far wall was an old mahogany artists’ table with a slanted top. Two of the photo paintings I’d been working on had been clipped there.
“Nick?” I said.
“Do you like it?” He put a hand on the table and beamed at me. “It’s your painting room. It’s all yours.”
“You did this for me?”
“Yeah, yeah. I took a few days away from the office. I’ve been working like crazy.” He looked around the room with a grin. “I was thinking it needed some artwork, though. Let’s see that painting.”
I glanced down and realized I was still holding Roberto’s canvas in my left hand. “Oh, I don’t think…”
But Nick was already taking it from me and peeling off the paper. “It’s great. God, it looks like you. Who’s the artist?”
I froze. “Um…”
Nick held it against the wall, right over the mahogany table. “It’s perfect. What do you think?”
I watched my husband smiling broadly, holding the canvas painted by Roberto. Why had I been so quick to judge? Why had I assumed he was cheating again? Panic and dread surged up my throat and pushed a tear from my eye.
Nick’s grin started to falter. “Rach?”
“This is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.”
He looked relieved, happy. He placed the painting on the table and held open his arms.
I brushed away the tear and rushed into them.
6
One Sunday a few months after Rome, Nick and I were in my new basement room. The globe fixture infused the place with cozy light, while a beam of hot August sun pushed its way through the sole window into the cool. Nick lounged in the plush chenille chair we’d put in the corner, and he had the Sunday papers fanned out around him. He liked to read the business section of one, then the book section of another. He felt that Sundays were the one day he could be unorganized, capricious. I stood at my artists’ table, swiping a solvent on a black-and-white photo to prime it for painting. It was a shot of Lake Michigan, and the Chicago skyline beyond that, taken from Diversey Beach. I had already printed and painted this photo twice before, but the blues I mixed kept making the sky too cartoonlike, the teal of the lake too austere, the city too gray.
“Are you ready for that benefit coming up?” I asked Nick.
I loved afternoons like this, conversations like this. They made me forget what I’d done in Rome and how I’d never been able to confess.
Nick gave a rueful laugh. “The printers haven’t done the programs yet, and of course that’s my department.”
“Well, you’re on the board now,” I said in a teasing tone. “You’ll have to handle it.”
Nick had finally made it onto the board, but he was essentially a pledge in a grown-up fraternity. As low man on the totem pole and someone trying to make it as an official member, he’d been given much of the unglamorous work that went into planning the board’s benefits and charity balls.
“Why did you ever let me join?” he said.
I turned, a wet cotton ball in my hand, and smirked. We both knew he loved being on the board. He loved the kudos it brought him from the docs at his office and the new friends it brought into our lives. The limelight he’d grown up in was back—albeit a tiny, probationary light. The truth was we were both on trial for the board. As a result, we were busier than ever with dinners and cocktail parties and lavish benefits. It tired me more easily than it did Nick, who preferred to gripe grudgingly and enjoy every second. And ultimately, seeing him pleased made me more happy than anything else.
As I turned back toward the photo, my eyes landed on the wall, on Roberto’s painting, still hung where Nick had insisted, right above my table. My stomach swooped and sank, as it did every time I saw it.
I’d told Nick the painting was a souvenir. He took that to mean it was a symbol of a memorable Roman trip, and he wanted such a thing in the new room he’d created. But to me, it was mostly symbolic of a grave mistake. The fact that my husband had put it there tortured me.
Every once in a great while, though, when I was able to push past the guilt, the painting was a symbol of sex and confidence and desire, all of which I’d lacked for a while before Rome. But now Nick and I had those things again. The sex was passionate and the ghosts were gone. It was as if my night with Roberto had driven away the woman Nick slept with in Napa. I knew that such a thought was somehow sick and wrong—what kind of person needed a matching bout of infidelity to cancel out the other?—but the effect couldn’t be denied. I no longer thought of the woman as a goddess. I no longer felt insecure or bruised. I realized how much I loved this man, my husband, and because of that, we’d grown assured again in our relationship.
“Nick,” I said impulsively.
“Yeah, hon?”
“I want to take down this painting.”
“Your Rome painting?”
I nodded.
“It looks great in here. Why?”
I stared at its slashes of red and gazed at the girl, who seemed to be me, in the middle of it. My throat threatened to close. “I just don’t like it anymore. I don’t need it.”
When Kit and I had returned from Rome, I agonized over whether to tell Nick about Roberto. Nick hadn’t told me about his affair until a few months after Napa, but the point was he had eventually. He’d had enough respect for me, and for us, to come clean with his sins. In those weeks after Rome, I understood how impossibly