WE SLEPT UNTIL FOUR,when the sound of a car horn on the street below stirred us awake. Paul pulled me toward him, and we lay there, entwined, for a few minutes, before he raised himself up onto one elbow and kissed me, softly, first on the shoulder and then on my breasts, which I just have to say—for the record—were pretty spectacular back then.
I feel like I need to address our sex life before we get too far into this story. We’d been intimate since the night we met (scandalous, I know), and if you’d asked me back then what sex with Paul was like, I’d have told you it was fabulous. In those early weeks together, we did it every chance we got: in Paul’s Chevelle; in my childhood bedroom, if my parents weren’t home; and a few times—when we were feeling particularly flush—at the Holiday Inn, where we’d rented a room for the night.
Even after we were married, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. I wanted sex all the time, and Paul was only too happy to oblige, but now I shudder to think how little I knew about my own body and what it took to bring it to life. I had no sisters, and my mother had certainly never sat me down and told me what an orgasm was or how to have one. The girls I worked with at Condon’s might have been useful in this department, but their heads were full of the same garbage mine was, gleaned mostly fromCosmopolitanarticles with titles such as “40 Catchable Bachelors Tell You What They Want” and “Dr. Reuben Lets You In On the Secrets of Male Sexuality (To Help You Win That Man).” That a guy like Paul needed to be kept happy was a given, but if Paul knew anything about the secrets offemalesexuality, he had not yet revealed them to me. We’d get going, and I’d be burning up with want and I’d gasp and moan and carry on, and Paul would explode, and afterward, he’d ask me, “Did you come?” thinking he was being a considerate lover, and I’d give him a blissful nod, because whatever it was we’d been doinghadfelt awfully good. Imagine my consternation when, sometime later, I realized that all I’d really been doing was warming up.
That might be too much information, now that I’m rereading it, but if you are to understand everything that happened to us on that island, you’ve got to understand what it was like for us in the beginning. Not to mention why, when Paul started to move on top of me that afternoon in the Pensione Michigan, I used my better judgment and wiggled out of the way. “Nope!” I said with a laugh as I rolled off the bed. “I am not about to spend my one day in Rome in bed with you.”
So we dressed and took off walking, armed only with the terrible map we’d been given at the front desk and my camera, which I’d loaded with a fresh roll of film.
“What do you want to see first?” Paul asked as he tried to make sense of the map. But I couldn’t even answer the question. What did I know of Rome? That the pope lived there?
We walked in the direction of the Colosseum, but we were too tight on funds to take the tour. Instead, Paul assumed an over-the-top Italian accent and pretended to be our guide. “This is where,” he said, with the jab of an imaginary sword, “gladiators fought each other to the death.”
“Oh yeah?”
He remained in character. “Many died, but those who survived were amply rewarded.”
“With what?”
“Gold, wine.” He arched his eyebrows at me. “Women.”
I punched him, lightly, on the shoulder. “Please.”
“What?” he said in his regular voice, but he was smiling.
I kissed him on the lips. “I don’t think you know the first thing about this place,” I said as I pulled away, then I took his picture because I wanted to remember the crumbling ruins in front of us, but also the way he was looking at me in that golden afternoon light.
12.
WE WANDERED THROUGH THE FORUM,along the Tiber, and up through the Jewish Quarter, hand in hand, until we found ourselves in this pretty little square lined with cafés.
“What’s that?” I asked, staring up at the pockmarked edifice of an old church, which had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
Paul consulted the map. “The Pantheon?”
The front of the building reminded me of Hibernian Hall, back in Charleston. There were these massive columns, which created a cavernous portico, and in the center of it all sat a pair of gargantuan wooden doors that beckoned us inside.
I was so impressed I wasn’t forming coherent sentences. “It looks so…”
“Old?” Paul offered.
“I was going to say beautiful.”
He shrugged. “That, too.”
There was something about the proportions of the place that got to me. Everything was oversize, which made me feel small, but in the best kind of way.
“Can we go in?” I asked Paul, and he didn’t say no, so we took the steps that led to the entrance and deposited a few coins in a slotted box labeledOFFERTE.
Inside, the rotunda echoed, and when my eyes adjusted to the light, I didn’t know where to look first. I took in the marble floor and the niches that at one time contained statues of pagan gods but now paid tribute to some of Italy’s most revered artists and statesmen. In one of the niches was a Madonna and Child, but underneath the pair sat a strange-looking sarcophagus with the name Raphael engraved in funny letters. I leaned into Paul and whispered, “Wait, is thattheRaphael?”
A few feet away from us, a straight-backed Italian woman toting a handkerchief around on a stick was telling a group of tourists that thetemple had been built in the second centuryADand that the dome under which we stood was the largest of its kind anywhere. “You will notice the oculus in the center of the dome?” she said, and everyone, including Paul and me, looked up at the hole in the coffered ceiling. “It lets in light, yes? And reduces the weight of so much concrete. But ancient Romans believed that it also connected them to the gods. That it was a door between earth and the heavens.”
The tourists nodded and moved along, but Paul and I remained where we were, staring up at the aureole of sky above our heads. My brother had been dead for almost three years by then, but there wasn’t a day I didn’t wonder where he’d gone.
“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked, and only after the words were out of my mouth did I realize it was a funny thing to ask a man I’d already married. Like, weren’t we supposed to have gotten all these big conversations out of the way already?
Paul must have thought the same thing because his head snapped around, and he looked at me, perplexed. “You don’t?”
