21. Rome, November
ROME, NOVEMBER
Toward the middle of November, my parents came out to visit.
Fearing international call charges, they had written to me about their plan on Facebook, which I never checked, so when I finished late one night in the studio and received a long text containing the logistics of their arrival, I almost collapsed.
They were due to arrive the following day.
I studied the message for signs of an ulterior motive.
My parents hadn’t visited me in London, let alone Rome.
They never flew anywhere. I panicked, imagining that one of them might have a disease.
When I met them from the airport bus, I discovered that they had won flight vouchers in the school staff raffle.
That weekend, it rained almost constantly.
As I guided my parents through the different neighborhoods I had fallen in love with, they trudged wearily alongside me, in plastic mackintoshes and hiking boots.
Their presence made me feel painfully exposed, as if my new life were a fiction.
Rome seemed more like a film set than ever, but uglier, too, as I absorbed their critical stance on what I was showing them: the tapestries by Raphael in the Vatican Museums were too dark to see.
The treasure I showed them in the vaults was simply more evidence of papal corruption.
Trastevere was a “bit of a mess,” thanks to the graffiti that was daubed onto the walls of its apartment blocks and restaurants.
I didn’t show them my apartment, for fear of their hostile assumptions once they worked out I was sharing a room with a girl.
I did my best to steer them out of Trastevere as quickly as possible, in dread of bumping into Mary or someone from the Melrose.
In the Colosseum, my dad kept asking, “Where are the lions, then?” until eventually I snapped and stalked off to wait for them in a café nearby.
At dinner, which we ate early, I told them that I was sitting for a portrait.
They pulled confused faces at this, before changing the subject to the volume of Chinese people they’d seen that day, and where their money might have come from.
Then my mum tuned her narrow gaze into mine.
“Speaking of money, does this course you’re on get you an actual job?” She was gripping her rucksack nervously in her lap.
“No,” I said quietly. Behind her shoulder, the Colosseum was garishly lit up in the colors of the Italian flag. “It doesn’t work like that. And it’s not a course, it’s a residency.”
“When’s it finish?”
“Christmas,” I said, feeling a shoot of pain as I acknowledged this. Hardly six weeks away.
“And then what?” my dad interjected.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll try and stay here. As long as my money lasts.”
“What?” said my mother. “Live here in Italy? Why?”
My parents were suspicious of anyone who emigrated from their home country.
It was running away, failing to face down your problems. I thought of Mary’s offer to stay another term.
The fantasy had evolved into a life where I lived in Mary’s apartment.
I brought us breakfast, focaccia from the bakery on Via del Moro, and we cycled to work together in the warm sunshine of a Roman spring.
At the day’s end, we’d sink wine, and eat spaghetti with artichokes, discussing what we had made, debating every creative decision.
Then my parents would be proved wrong. I wasn’t running away from life. I was running toward it.
“It feels too soon to go back,” I said. “I’m only just settling in.”
My mum delivered a slanted smile. “It’s not a special someone keeping you here, is it?”
I felt myself flush. Any attempt to discuss my feelings for Polly after the saga at school had been immediately shut down.
Then I had given up trying, fearful of Mr. Greening’s therapy leaflets.
That was years ago now, and as I studied my parents’ faces, I tried to summon the self-acceptance that Jean was encouraging in me.
For a moment, the world stilled. I took a breath.
“Actually, Mum, since you mention it—”
But then Dad interrupted loudly, folding his arms. “No Italian boyfriend?”
The world animated again. Our Diet Cokes arrived.
“No, Dad,” I said, swallowing away the tightness in my throat and focusing on the menu.
My parents’ flat-out denial of who I was never failed to wound me, and I felt stupid for even considering a frank conversation with them.
They weren’t interested in the reality of who I was. They much preferred to hide.
I ordered Roman tripe that night, knowing it would freak my mum out, which it did.
When the bill arrived, I calculated the figures on my phone, but my dad surprised us by offering to pay.
As we left the restaurant, my parents identified which were the most expensive items on the menu. It was noted that they were mine.
On the Sunday morning, I took my parents to my studio in Monti to show them some of the pieces I was making. They nodded along as I talked, though I might as well have been speaking in Neapolitan dialect.
“This I like. This I can actually see in someone’s kitchen,” my mum said.
I looked up and noticed that the jug she was holding came from a different shelf. “Not one of mine, Mum,” I said. “Sadly.”
It wasn’t necessary to leave as early for the airport as they did, but we decided to part ways just after lunch.
At Monday’s sitting, when Mary asked how the weekend had gone, I maintained the fiction of their scrappy bohemianism.
I said that it was so nice and heard myself tell lies about the restaurants we ate at, the galleries my father insisted I visit, that I so wished she’d been around to meet them.
“Lucky you,” Mary said.
When I arrived at Jean’s later that week for dinner, the flat was full of lit candles.
Jean was freshly showered and smelling of face cream, her hair still damp and elegantly combed back from her face.
I felt a strong urge to cling on to her soft neck when she greeted me at the door, enveloping me in her warm, tuberose scent.
“Oh!” Jean said, releasing me and hardening a little. “So you didn’t bring her?”
She knew that I had stayed the previous night at Mary’s and that we had spent the day together, warding off comedowns in her flat.
Jean had extended the dinner invitation to us both, but I didn’t feel ready to introduce them yet.
I was too shaky from staying up all night and, besides, when I left Mary, she was walking toward the bathroom with a glass of wine, perky again, and heading over to Vincenzo’s.
We ate pasta with lemon and olive oil alongside some pale slices of veal. Jean listened patiently as I tucked into her wine and wittered on about Mary’s relationship with Vincenzo.
“I don’t get why I haven’t met him yet. Do you think she’s afraid I’ll say something?” Jean shrugged, a little stonily, but I carried on. “This evening was the worst. She does this thing of trying on all her outfits in front of me. Like she enjoys me watching her get changed. It’s total agony.”
I looked up to see Jean watching me carefully, a dark look on her face. “Don’t you think it’s time you were just honest with Mary?”
Her sharp tone wrong-footed me. “I thought you said I should be patient with her. Not push her into anything…” I trailed off nervously.
Jean sighed and put down her cutlery. A sudden clatter of steel on ceramic. The darkness on her face was spreading. “I asked you to bring her tonight so I could help the two of you. Then you overruled me. You thought better of it—”
“She was tired—”
“Well, I’m getting tired of this, Gus.” Her eyelids twitched with anger. The way she said my name caused a flood of fear. “I can’t help you both.” She pressed her palms together, tipping them in a prayer gesture. “Not so informally. No. You’re asking way too much of me.”
My cheeks burned. Jean had never spoken to me so roughly before.
I stared at her, desperately trying to read her face, to understand what I had done, but she was illegible.
I whispered an apology but Jean ignored it.
She wiped her mouth, then picked up her fork again with purpose, stabbing it into her food.
“You have to understand, all the coaching I give you. All the support. It’s my profession .”
Only a handful of seconds passed, but the silence felt terrible. I stared into the candle until my eyes hurt. “Sorry,” I said, my voice croaking again. “I thought we were friends. I was just asking as a friend.”
Jean grunted an acknowledgment. There was a slight softening in her face now; she looked thoughtful as she curled a hive of spaghetti around her fork. Sad, even.
“Correct. We are friends. I care a great deal about you. But there are also boundaries.”
“I’m sorry—”
“And people pay for my expertise. It’s not something I can just keep giving away.”
“I know—”
She jabbed a thumb toward the bottle of wine that I’d drained. “And I’m not like Mary, or those other girls,” she said, raising her eyebrows with mock authority. “I don’t have endless reserves for you to sponge off of.”
I sat there, stunned. How wrong of me to cross Jean, to abuse her confidence and all her smoothing, consolatory words that I had started to rely so much on.
I thought back to the irritation I felt on nights out, when she texted me, and felt sick with guilt.
I had been taking her for granted. And I must have been boring her, I realized, sitting there, eating her food and going on about Mary.
If I wasn’t careful, I would push her away.
Jean said I was always pushing people away.