We arrived in Rome, exhausted, hungover, and smelling like ashtrays, at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning. Our instructions were to collect our bags and submit them to customs inspectors for clearance, then make our way to the domestic terminal where Alisarda Airlines ran flights to Olbia—a coastal town in northern Sardinia—twice a day. Throughout the airport, I kept seeing these scary uniformed guys carrying machine guns, but when I asked Paul about them, he said he thought they were with the Carabinieri, which was Italy’s paramilitary police force.
We had been warned in the welcome packet sent by Paul’s sponsor that Alisarda had a reputation for overbooking their flights, so when we finally got to the right terminal and an agent explained in slow and halting English that we did not, in fact, have seats on the evening flight to Olbia, neither of us were entirely surprised.
“Cosa facciamo?” said Paul, because I guess he’d figured we were going to get further in Italian than English.
“Ritornate domani,” said the agent.
“Domani?” Paul repeated.
“What’sdomanimean?” I asked him.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and the agent issued us a pair of tickets for a flight that did indeed depart the following morning.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Paul after he’d found a telephone exchange and left word with the switchboard operator on the ship that we’d be arriving a day later than expected.
“See Rome, I guess?”
I think it’s important to note that, while Paul was better traveled than I was, it wasn’t like he really knew what he was doing, either. His family had enough money to take the train from Richmond to New York on occasion, and in the summer, they’d get in the car and drive to Virginia Beach, or to a river house that Paul’s mother’s family owned in Deltaville. But he hadn’t been out of the country until his first sea tour, when his sub had put in at Faslane in Scotland. He’d also been to Rota, Spain, in the fall of 1973, which I suspect had something to do with the Yom Kippur War, although he never said it did. That was about it, though at the time I thought all this coming and going made him the most worldly individual to ever walk the face of the earth.
We changed some money at a little kiosk in the airport and allowed one of the men waving a sign over his head to steer us toward a cab. His sign readPENSIONE MICHIGAN, which sounded like a funny name for an Italian hotel, and I could tell Paul was anxious, the way he was sitting straight as a board in the backseat, both eyes on the meter. “Pensione Michigan?” he confirmed with the cabbie, twice, apparently convinced we were about to be driven to an abandoned lot and robbed or murdered or maybe both.
I decided right then and there that, since he was doing so much worrying, I was going to sit back and enjoy the ride. And what a ride it was. We pulled away from the terminal and onto a busy street that soon turned into a full-blown highway. There were cars and motorcycles going every which way, and beautiful trees that reminded me of marshmallows. Everything was so foreign to me—the vegetation, the road signs, the graffiti, even the litter—that you could have dangled an empty potato chip bag in front of my face, and I probably would have said,Oh, will you look at that! Italian potato chips were in there!
The highway narrowed as we drew closer to the city center, and if we’doffered to pay our taxi driver extra to show us the sights, I doubt he would or could have done a better job. We passed Circo Massimo, where the Romans used to hold their chariot races, and the Tempio di Portuno. Then we were whizzing around a giant traffic circle with that scrumptious white wedding cake of a building in the center of it, and headed toward Rome’s Esquilino neighborhood, better known as Termini.
10.
THE PENSIONE MICHIGAN WAS LOCATEDon the Via Nazionale, within walking distance of the train station, which I now realize is a terrible location but at the time seemed totally fine. More than fine. Perfect, really.
Paul paid the cabdriver, then we dragged our bags into the lobby. “Wait here,” he told me, while he went to the desk to inquire about a room.
When he returned a few minutes later, dangling a plastic key chain that read 407 in big gold numbers, I asked what should have been a fairly innocuous question: “Where’s the elevator?”
It turned out there wasn’t one. Or at least not a functional one, so poor Paul made three trips up and down those stairs, while I sat in the lobby keeping an eye on the rest of our things.
“Did you know,” he said upon the completion of his first or second trip, “that in Italy, the ground floor and the first floor are not one and the same thing?”
“So, we’re—”
He finished the sentence for me: “Actually on the fifth floor.”
Poor Paul.
When the two of us and all our bags were finally in room 407, Paul kicked the door shut and collapsed onto the bed. “We made it,” he said to the ceiling, while I walked to the window and pulled back the curtains. Our room faced the street, but five floors up, the backfiring engines and car horns were reduced to a soft hum.
I checked out the adjoining bathroom, but there was no tub, not even a stall. All I saw was a showerhead and a couple of faucets coming out of the wall and a drain in the center of the tiled floor. “Paul, you’ve got to see this,” I shouted into the bedroom as I turned on the water.
By the time he staggered to his feet and peeked around the doorway, I’d stripped off my clothes and was standing in the middle of the bathroomunder a pulsing stream of hot water. He raised his eyebrows at me, and I spun around in a little circle. “There’s no stall! Not even a curtain!”
There was water everywhere—on the pedestal sink and the toilet and my clothes, which I’d carelessly left in precisely the place I’d stepped out of them.
A shower, after more than twenty-four hours of traveling, would have felt good under any circumstances. But there was something about standing there in the middle of that room, in the middle of that day, in the middle of that city, that felt a little like I was being born anew.
“You joining me?” I teased my new husband, but he didn’t need any convincing.
“When in Rome,” he said as he pulled his shirt over his head.
11.
