Burning the Map Read online

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “Northwestern Law School.”

  “You’re a law student, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said. He moved closer as a waitress jostled him from behind, and he smelled clean, fresh, as if he’d just showered. “What about you?”

  “Lawyer.” He made an embarrassed sort of laugh. “M&A.” And then, as if I might not understand, he added, “Mergers and acquisitions.”

  “I know what M&A means,” I said, sounding a little huffy. In reality, I was trying to cover up how daunted I felt to meet someone roughly my age who actually made a living practicing law.

  “Sure,” he said, coloring a little. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.” I graced him with my best smile. I liked his blushing.

  I heard my name being called and turned to see my friend, P.J., another law student, pointing toward the door. “We’re out of here,” he yelled.

  “Where’s Kat?”

  P.J., who’d been hanging out with Kat and me for a year by then, gave an exaggerated shrug, as if to say, “Who knows? Who cares?”

  I glanced at John. “I guess I’m going.”

  “Are you sure? Why don’t you stay for the rest of the game?” He smiled at me, his lips slightly parted, and for some reason, I wanted to lean into them. “I’ll take care of you,” he said in a joking tone.

  But I sensed he was serious, and I stayed.

  Thinking back on that now, that somewhat self-conscious meeting that led to a smooth transition straight into a relationship, makes it seem even more alien for me to roll into my pensione at 6:00 a.m., all hot and bothered and mascara stained. Yet in a strange way, I’m proud of my current state, because this sordidness smells of sex and lust, and I haven’t had that particular scent for as long as I can remember.

  Francesco drops me off in front as the early-morning commuters begin to surface. Their presence doesn’t prevent him from snaking an arm around my waist and drawing me into an extended kiss while he still straddles his bike.

  When I finally pull myself away, he says, “I want to show you more special places of Roma. I will come back in a few hours.”

  “I can’t.” My voice sounds unconvincing. “I’m sightseeing with my friends.”

  “Tomorrow then.”

  “No,” I say, although right now I want nothing more than to spend my last hours in Rome with him.

  His brow furrows as if we’re experiencing a language problem.

  “I’m taking a train to the coast tonight,” I say, feeling the need to explain. “To Brindisi. And then a boat to Greece.”

  “But then you must spend today with me.” He puts a hand to my cheek, a feather touch, and kisses me again.

  When I open my eyes, I find myself shrugging and agreeing. The girls will kill me, but I’ll have to kill myself if I don’t see him one more time.

  “Eleven o’clock,” Francesco says. “I will be back.” He kisses me once more before he sputters off into the day.

  The concierge, a different one from the night before, raises his eyebrows as I burst into the lobby. I give him a quick half smile, feeling undressed and dirty from his leer. Rather than wait for the elevator under his scrutiny, I take the stairs two at a time.

  When I open the door, the room feels dark and cool. Kat is sleeping in a little pink T-shirt on top of her sheets. She seems to be without Guiseppe, but one can never be sure where guys are lurking when Kat’s around. Lindsey, though, is wide-awake. She’s sitting on her bed, headphones stuck in her ears, a Scott Turow novel resting on her knees. She’s studying it with intense concentration, as if she’s reading an ancient scroll depicting the hidden tomb of a pharaoh.

  “Hi,” I whisper, waving my arms, trying to catch her attention and avoid waking Kat, although the fact is that Kat could sleep through an avalanche.

  “Sin,” I say a little louder. “Sorry I’m late.”

  I cross the room and stand right next to her, but she won’t look up from her book. She’s ignoring me. I feel my stomach drop.

  I despise fights. I suppose it has something to do with the utter lack of conflict in my family. Even now, in the midst of their problems, my parents rarely duke it out. Instead, they stifle, pout, avoid and cry a lot. I guess I just never learned to do confrontation well, which is one of the reasons why I’m so nervous about practicing law. Litigation is inherently confrontational, a world of egos and bullshit and fighting for fighting’s sake. I didn’t really choose to go into it. Instead, it seemed to choose me during my summer associate position, when the firm kept pairing me with the trial group, telling me that my outgoing personality was perfect for it. Maybe, but I’m not well-suited for clashes with friends.

  I nudge Lindsey with my knee, and she finally looks up at me, clicking off her Walkman with a punch of her finger.

  “Where were you?” she says, her voice hard and demanding, and it hits me that Sin should be the trial lawyer, not me. She’s much better at intimidation and interrogation.

  I try to ignore her tone. “I’m so sorry I’m late, but you won’t believe it. It’s the best story. We—”

  “You were supposed to meet us here at midnight,” she says, interrupting me. “Last night.”

  “I’m really, really sorry.”

  She gives a short, bitter laugh that sounds like gunfire.

  “We fell asleep,” I say, wanting to make this better, to tell her all about my night, but she shoots me a look that could wither roses.

  All at once, my natural inclination to avoid conflict dissipates. She had reason to be worried when I didn’t come home last night, maybe even to be annoyed, but she’s ruining the first honestly good mood I’ve had in months.

  “What?” I say, my voice a fierce whisper. “How come Kat gets to pick up every guy from here to Munich, but when I meet one person, you act like the Gestapo?”

  Our voices have roused Kat, who sits up on her cot, watching us in silence. I wonder for a second if she heard my comment and is pissed off, but I dismiss the thought. If there’s anyone who hates confrontation more than me, it’s Kat. Like me, she probably gets this trait from her parents. After they divorced, they both kept a room in each of their homes for her, but they were more interested in dating and their careers than they were in Kat. She’d tried to scream and yell, she’d told me. She’d thrown some fantastic tantrums, but the parent of the moment would simply ship her back to the other like a UPS package. Kat doesn’t scream or yell much anymore.

  Now she sits on her bed, biting a thumbnail, and I can almost imagine her as a little kid with her thumb in her pretty mouth.

  “Well, for one thing,” Sin says, “you have a boyfriend.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” I say in a haughty tone. How dare she remind me?

  “And for another thing, Kat always comes home when she says she will. She’s around when you need her. She’s a friend.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s just that…” Lindsey stops, pursing her lips as if trying to gather the right words in her mouth. This makes her look like my mother right before she’s about to lay some doozy of a revelation on me, like how she’s started masturbating again after a twenty-year hiatus.

  “It’s just that what you did last night,” Sin says, “blowing us off—it’s basically what you’ve been doing for the last two years.”

  Her words hit me like a slap. I sense some shred of reality there, but it seems like an overstatement, a gross generalization.

  “I’ve never said I’d be somewhere and didn’t show up.”

  “No, maybe not like that, but you’ve been avoiding us since you started dating John. You never call. You never have time to go out with us anymore. And when we finally do get together, once in a great while, it’s like you’re not really there. You’re just different. You’re not like you used to be.”

  I can’t believe she’s saying this. Maybe I’ve been a little detached lately, but I’ve been studying for a goddamne
d living. My life hasn’t exactly been a Martha Stewart picnic.

  I turn to Kat. “Is that what you think, too?”

  “Oh, honey.” She rises to come to me, putting her arm around my shoulders. “It’s just that we wish you were around more. We wish it was like the old days.”

  “That’s not fair,” I say, jabbing a finger at Lindsey. “You haven’t been around all that much either, you know.” Lindsey’s been putting in ten-to twelve-hour days and lots of weekends at her ad agency. She wants to make vice president within the next year and be the youngest VP ever.

  “That’s true,” she says, “but I’m going to change that. I have to.”

  “Well, things will never be exactly like they were in college, and you can’t expect them to be.”

  “Maybe it’s not fair, sweetie,” Kat says, “but what Sin’s talking about is true. You’re not the same person we used to know. I mean, I know you’re in there somewhere.” She squeezes my shoulders. “I just haven’t seen you in so long, and when I do get to actually go out with you, it doesn’t seem like you’re having much fun.”

  “I had fun last night.” I shake her arms off me.

  “It’s okay,” Kat says. “We just miss you.”

  I know what she means. I miss me, too, sometimes. I drop my head in my hands.

  But as I sit there, some realization dawns. I raise my face. “Wait a minute. You’ve felt like this for two years, and you’ve never said a word?” I’d been a tad mopey for a while, particularly this summer, but they’re talking about two years. The whole time I’ve been dating John.

  I leave Kat’s side and walk across the room to the window. Across the way, I see a couple on their terrace reading papers, eating grapefruit.

  I turn back to Kat and Sin, sitting side by side. It’s me against them right now, and I hate it.

  Kat looks down, then back up at me. Sin shrugs. “We knew you were in love with him.”

  “You’re supposed to be my best friends. How can you be pissed off at me for years and not say a word?”

  Kat blinks a few times like a stumped contestant on Jeopardy.

  “We were just hoping it would go away,” Sin says.

  Her words feel like a betrayal. All this time, I keep thinking. All this time they’ve been holding it back. We used to be the kind of friends who said anything and everything to each other, the minute the thought occurred to us.

  “Hideous,” Kat would say when I came down the stairs of the sorority house in one of my slutty outfits. “At least take off the fuck-me pumps.”

  And Sin didn’t know the meaning of holding back, which was something I’d come to love about her. It was Sin who helped me decide on what law school to attend. I’d narrowed it down to Northwestern or Harvard. I was enamored by the thought of Harvard Law School. I liked simply saying those words, and I imagined the tingle I’d get every time I told someone, “Yes, I attend Harvard. Harvard Law School.” I’d only gotten in because my father’s boss was an alum who happened to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, but that didn’t bother me. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to move to Boston.

  I was debating the subject one night about a month before our college graduation. Sin listened to my list of pros and cons for about ten seconds before she held up her hand and said, “You’re not the Harvard Law type.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I sat back and crossed my arms.

  “C’mon,” she said. “Harvard Law is Birkenstocks and environmental activism and people whose ancestors went there before them. You’re not about that. You’re…” She threw her hands up. “You’re Steve Maddens and aerosol hair spray, and you’re the first person in your family to go to law school.”

  I kept my arms crossed over my chest, trying to look insulted, but she was right. She usually was. The next day, I sent my acceptance form to Northwestern.

  Now I turn back to the window again. The couple on the terrace is discussing something, grapefruit dishes pushed aside, their heads close together.

  All the confidence and allure I fleetingly gained with Francesco drains away. I feel like a day-old balloon. My friends don’t feel like friends, and this hurts more than anything in recent memory. I’ve always had this innate sense that while schools and boys and jobs might pass through my life as if on a high-speed conveyor belt, my friends will be the one steady force. I should be looking for a way to smooth things over, but I feel attacked and vulnerable.

  “Come on, Case. Let’s get an early start and head to the catacombs,” Kat says, trying to make nice. “We can talk more about this later.”

  “I’m meeting Francesco, and I need to get some sleep first.” My voice is stiff, flat, and even as I say it, I know I should call and cancel. There are two problems with this potential cancellation, though. One, I don’t have his phone number. Two, although it’s juvenile, I want them to hurt as much as I do.

  The room is so quiet it feels like it’s made of glass and the slightest movement will shatter us all into pieces.

  “Un-fucking-believable.” Lindsey’s loud voice breaks the silence, the volume something I haven’t heard often. She pauses, but gets no response from me. I stand with my back to her, still staring out the window. “Jesus. You’re acting like a fucking child!”

  I’m vaguely aware that she has a point, but I’m too stung by their criticism to be mature about it. I go into the bathroom and splash water on my face, feeling jumbled and confused. I can hear them whispering, moving about the room. I brush my teeth and, for lack of something better to do, rearrange the toiletries on the counter, putting the moisturizers and hair products and eye creams in a height line like a row of marionettes.

  About ten minutes later, I hear Kat say in an imploring tone, “Leave her alone.”

  Footsteps approach the bathroom, then I hear Lindsey’s sarcastic voice. “Have fun with your new friend.”

  6

  After they leave, I lie on the bed with my eyes closed for two hours, although I catch only brief moments of sleep. I can’t seem to stop reviewing the argument, re-running each of Kat’s and Lindsey’s words in my head. My feelings bounce back and forth between furious and betrayed, then skid to the unrealistic hope that they’ll walk in the door with doughnuts and cappuccinos.

  When I get up, I see a note on the bureau from Kat, ever the peacemaker. “Casey,” it says, “I hope you’re okay. Lindsey and I went to the catacombs. We’ll meet you back here at four o’clock so we can check out and get to the train station. You are coming with us, right?” I know she probably meant to be humorous, but the question cuts me. As if they don’t know me anymore. But isn’t that their point?

  My fight with Kat and Sin seems to dull everything. The tree outside our window is lackluster now, some of its blooms fading and drooping. Even the thought of being back in Rome doesn’t seem as exciting. Yet when I step outside the pensione and hear the anemic chug of Francesco’s scooter rounding the corner, adrenaline shoots back through my veins. I tug my shirt down so that it shows a little more cleavage. I try for an alluring pose on the stoop.

  He’s wearing sunglasses and a light blue shirt that billows around him as he pulls into the courtyard, slows in front of me and turns off the engine.

  “Ciao,” he says, giving me a grin, a flash of white teeth.

  Unfortunately, no witty greeting comes to mind. “Morning,” I say.

  “You are ready?”

  I nod.

  He holds out his hand, and I take it.

  The bulk of my day with Francesco is a blur of cathedrals, museums, monuments, all amazing in their historical significance, yet rarely included in the standard tours for one reason or another—their disrepair, their locations in crappy or out of the way areas. Francesco gives me morsels of information at each stop, making me momentarily forget this morning’s argument, yet it always comes back.

  “Look at his beard from this angle,” Francesco says.

  We’re standing in front of Michelangelo’s sculpture of
Moses, located in an unassuming, rather hidden church reached only by climbing high stone steps and walking through a tunnel. The gray sculpture is life-size, and strangely, Moses has two horns like the devil.

  Francesco takes my elbow and guides me to the right. “It is Michelangelo’s own profile cut into the beard,” he says.

  I move my head this way and that, squinting my eyes, striving to make out the sculptor’s face in the long tangle of stone. I wonder, for a nanosecond, how long it took him to carve this hulking thing, before my mind shifts back into the worn ruts, and instead I start wondering if Michelangelo ever felt unclear, unsure of himself, or if he always knew he was creating a masterpiece. Was his identity ever vague? Did he ever cheat on a lover and feel guilty for not feeling guiltier? Did he ever argue with his friends and not be able to erase the scene from his head? I keep hearing Kat’s and Lindsey’s accusations, seeing Lindsey’s face frozen in a sneer.

  I try to regain the dreamlike reverie I had last night. I grab Francesco’s hand, planting a quick, wet kiss on his lips, but daylight and guilt keep fighting against me.

  We have lunch during the siesta at a small café near Piazza di Spagna. We sit in a corner by a vine-covered wall, ivory linens on the table.

  The place reminds me of a trattoria in Piazza del Popolo where my parents often ate when they visited me. I told them over and over to try other places, other neighborhoods, but they were happy there, they said. They’d gotten to know the menu and the owners. Why try anything new? They seemed perfectly happy with each other then, too. Whatever had transpired over the course of five years to put them where they are now—two tense strangers who happen to share a home—is a mystery to me.

  I’ve received my mother’s version, of course, during our way too-frequent telephone conversations.

  “You know, Casey,” she’d said. “It’s the sex. All of a sudden, he wants nighties and negligees, and I’m in sweatpants and T-shirts.”

  “So put on a teddy, Mom,” I’d said, exasperated again, trying very hard not to imagine my father having sexual desires of any kind or picture my mother in a butt-thonged, demicup teddy.