Chapter 10
THE PENSIONE MICHIGAN WAS LOCATED on 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.
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 bathroom under 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.