The woman in seat 13C
The average city-dweller passes a thousand different people every day.
By that measure, one must pass the same strangers time and time again, sharing the same pavement, the same café, the same train carriage, never once realising, never once stopping to see.
Why would you recognise one face, and not the other nine hundred and ninety-nine?
Passers-by, by their very nature, pass you by.
Things are different when you’re travelling.
In a foreign country, you’re bound together by your otherness, more likely to recognise a fellow traveller.
You might see a couple on your plane, then spot the same couple in a museum.
Don’t I know you from somewhere? You might glimpse that couple in your hotel lift, or glistening on a sunbed by the pool, or clinking glasses on your last night at the same restaurant.
It’s freaky, you might think. You might nudge your husband, say it out loud. Isn’t it uncanny?
‘Let’s go to Cinecittà,’ the girlfriend is saying, eyes bright. ‘Let’s frolic in the Trevi Fountain.’
Her boyfriend, black leather bag hoisted over one muscular shoulder, checks a black Casio watch. ‘Let’s check in first,’ he says. He hails a taxi. ‘We can frolic at the hotel.’
His girlfriend looks up at him, and he looks down at her, and it occurs to the woman watching that it’s been a long time since someone looked at her like this.
Like something to be pulled apart and licked clean.
At some point, she’d reached an age when people stopped looking.
Her husband is already ten paces ahead of her, so she ambles, watching the girlfriend haul up her own heavy bag and attempt to hit her boyfriend with it.
The action topples her over, but he catches her before she falls.
‘Did you cut the arms off this yourself?’ the girlfriend asks, nodding at his top, her small hands on his long, brown arms.
Behind his Wayfarers, he’s as inscrutable as a poker player. He tilts her chin upwards with one finger, kisses her lightly on the lips. ‘No comment.’
At the hotel, the husband of the woman from seat 13C spends fifteen minutes failing to work the safety-deposit box. The wife shares a look with the handsome bellhop. Is she surprised when he looks right through her?
She’ll put such things out of her mind until that evening, when she’ll realise that the young couple are staying at the same hotel.
From there, she’ll see them everywhere. In the Forum, two distant figures in the dust, embracing under crumbling columns like doomed lovers painted on an ancient vase.
In the Pantheon, a welcome escape from the stifling day outside.
The girlfriend is scratching impressions in a sketchbook, while he is staring silently and solemnly upwards at the oculus, which shoots a single beam of sunlight like a pinhole camera into the vast and echoing chamber.
Again, at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, he pulling out her chair in a dim and candlelit corner, where they’ll eat fried artichokes and sheets of pasta coated in melted pecorino, hand-shaved slices of black truffle quivering on top.
Each of them leaning over, to stroke a hand or to steal a kiss or to tuck away a strand of hair.
He’ll run a fingertip across his plate and lick the residue.
She’ll order a second fiasco of Chianti, half of which they’ll take back to their hotel room.
It’s a special kind of intoxication, to be so dizzy on someone else that everything around you falls away.
The couple can’t keep their hands off one another.
They can’t keep it down. In the morning, at the breakfast buffet, everyone watches them, sharing wry smiles, rolling jealous eyes.
They all want what the couple have. They all want to be voracious.
The couple sit on the same side of a small table, he picking wafer-thin slices of prosciutto off his plate and sucking his fingers, she burying her face in his neck and baring her teeth.
The woman from seat 13C finds herself in the Villa Borghese.
Her husband is not one for culture, and his nose is so sunburnt it’s blistered, so she’d left him behind.
Here, it is just her, and her thoughts, and the couple.
The girlfriend is crouching with that sketchbook balanced on top of her bare legs, drawing furtively, scribbling things out and starting again.
There is a dewy pink sheen over the tops of the girl’s freckled shoulders, a lasting blush on the arches of her high cheekbones.
Her boyfriend is sitting beside her with a sketchbook of his own, concentrating on a bust he’s trying to replicate in charcoal.
The woman moves from statue to statue, tries to find something in each slab of marble. Then, a light touch on her elbow, and she finds herself standing face to face with the girl from the couple. The girl rubs one of her reddened shoulders, speaks self-consciously.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she says. ‘But I drew you.’
When the woman from seat 13C finally looks up from the drawing, its artist has already returned to her boyfriend.
He’s holding his own drawing to his broad chest, asking her to promise not to laugh.
He turns the terrible sketch around, and his girlfriend does as promised.
Instead, she strokes his hair, leans forward on her knees on the cold marble, kisses him right there on the gallery floor.
The woman looks back down at the drawing she’s been given. She searches the black lines, the shadows of her figure. She would never see herself like this.
She sees the couple just once more. She leaves her husband sleeping in bed, finding herself a table for one on the cobbles of Trastevere. It is late. She doesn’t do things like this. It is not surprising, to find them here. It is comforting, in a way.
‘Let’s move here,’ the girlfriend is saying. ‘You could actually learn Italian.’
She is drinking a negroni. The boyfriend is holding a cigarette in one and a bottle of beer in the other.
‘I don’t need to,’ he says. ‘I am Italian.’
A man holding a bunch of roses arrives at their table. ‘Prego?’ he says.
The boyfriend freezes, just long enough to send his girlfriend into peals of laughter.
‘Sì,’ he says then, reaching for his wallet. ‘Voglio—’ He holds up one finger. ‘Uno.’ He looks defeated. ‘One, please.’
He gives his girlfriend the flower. She takes it, studies it, runs her finger over the length of the stem. She isn’t laughing any more. ‘No one has ever bought me a rose,’ she says.
Her boyfriend’s eyes travel over her. ‘I find that hard to believe.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Not even…?’ He takes a swig from the neck of his bottle. Raises his eyebrows.
The woman from seat 13C wonders who he means. His girlfriend seems to know exactly who.
She shakes her head. ‘Definitely not.’
The boyfriend looks almost pleased. ‘Prick.’
She chews her lip, turns her eyes downwards. ‘He was.’
The boyfriend looks serious. ‘He was?’
She sighs. ‘We made this short film together.’ She looks up at him.
‘Not the black-and-white one I told you I wanted to do. This was before.’ She shakes her head.
‘He said I was hard to work with. Hopelessly insecure.’ She grits her teeth.
‘Overbearing. Possessive. He used to go after other girls, but only so I’d try and catch him.
So he could make me make a scene.’ She sniffs.
‘I know how that sounds. I spent so much of my life feeling irrational or immature.’ She closes her eyes.
‘I can’t tell you how many times he called me crazy.
They all did. They all believed it.’ Her eyes open again.
‘Why wouldn’t they?’ she says. ‘I kept going back to him.’
‘Clara…’
He reaches across the table for her hand. She lets him take it. The woman watching them feels like she might cry.
‘Sorry,’ the girlfriend says. ‘Overshare.’ She smiles lightly. ‘When I look back on it, I think he was the jealous one. Or afraid. Of losing me. Of me realising I didn’t need him.’
‘You’re giving him too much credit.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘He wasn’t a nice person.’ A pause. ‘It’s still hard, sometimes, to believe he was wrong. To believe that I can make anything worth something.’ Her voice falters. ‘To believe that I’m worth something.’
The boyfriend is still leaning across, still staring at her. He squeezes her hand, his eyes dark and intense. ‘You’re everything,’ he says.
She laughs, waves the topic away. ‘Your turn.’
It’s a joke. But it also isn’t. She expects something from him, for him to bare some trauma of his own.
The moment passes. The girlfriend looks down.
And the woman who once sat in seat 13C is so caught up in the subtext of that look that she doesn’t see the man with the roses until he has arrived above her.
Her breath catches, her hand rising to her chest. She comes back to herself, to her table and the vendor looming over it.
If she were with her husband, he’d say that the roses are a rip-off.
Two euros for one? And where are you going to put it?
We leave tomorrow, and we’re not taking it with us.
But her husband isn’t here. She looks back to the couple, who are standing silently to leave, counting out the change for their bill.
She thinks about buying a rose for herself.
She doesn’t have to. The man who was at the table behind her, the man drinking alone in an open-necked shirt, is already paying for one, already handing it to her.
Don’t I know you from somewhere? She searches the corners of her mind.
Why would you recognise one face out of nine hundred and ninety-nine?
The handsome bellhop looks different out of his uniform.
He’s not looking through her, now. He’s looking at her, and she knows what that look means.
She might blush, might avert her eyes, but she won’t protest when he asks if he can take the spare seat at her table.
The young couple walk off along the cobbles, her head nestled into his side, his arm threaded protectively around her waist. When they reach the river, they turn to one another, share a slow kiss. But the woman from seat 13C isn’t watching them any more.