She loved New York, but it was not her city, she knew that now. It suited her to be part of this intricate network of European capitals, each only a few hours away from the others, each containing its Caravaggios and Sorollas and Soutines. She had even started talking to her father more, now they were only an hour time difference apart.
And she was discovering that the slower pace of Rome soothed her. She was industrious, but never exhausted. She slept deeply and alone. She had not yet taken a lover, though one of the other artists, a shy Swiss designer her age, had confessed his feelings for her late one night in the studio. She needed more time, she’d told him gently. In the afternoons she drank espresso standing at the bar and watched the Italians flit busily around each other like butterflies. She had finally learned to be by herself in public without thinking about what others were thinking of her. It was a relief to live from the inside out at long last.
“Trying too,” she said.
Frank nodded, satisfied. “You want to show me the installation piece?”
She led him to a small shed behind the studio building. Cleo opened the door to reveal a square white room with a projector set up in the center facing the ceiling. Dark soil covered the floor. The smell of it hit him in a nauseating wave, earthy, rich, and sweet.
“Cley …” He hovered in the doorway.
“I know,” she said. “Please. Just lie down.”
He lay down on the earth, still sick with the smell of it. Cleo turned the projector on, and the room turned red. She lay down next to him. Crimson light wavered across the ceiling like the wrinkles on a poppy petal. The smell of soil was everywhere, tugging him back to that moment …
What surprised him was the rush of anger he felt returning to it. He had been the one to find her and call the ambulance, kneeling in the soil all blackened with her blood, and now here was Cleo, making it into art. Sticking a crystal up herself and calling it healing. The room had turned a blood-drenched carmine. Well, good for her. He was glad to be rid of her. He had used that violence too, to propel himself out of their marriage into a relationship with a sane woman. Thank god. He wanted to sit up and tell her about the divorce papers. He wanted a drink. He wanted a thousand drinks. He wanted to take fistfuls of earth and grind them into his eyes and scream like a baby. He wanted his mother, not his actual mother, that self-involved drunk, but his real mother, still unfound, the woman who could truly take care of him. He wanted Eleanor.
“Cleo,” he sat up. “I can’t, I can’t.”
Cleo put her hand on his arm, but he pushed it away. “It’s too much, Cley.” He shocked himself by bursting into tears. “Too much.”
He bowed his head in his hands and sobbed. He could not remember the last time he’d cried. It was an exorcism of tears. Cleo pulled him forward and cradled his head in her lap. She had not wanted to hurt him, but she needed him to see this. Their whole marriage, she had submitted to other people’s versions of her, retreating into the shape of their desires. She thought of Frank’s vow on their wedding day. When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light. Now she had completed that process on her own. She had met the darkest part of herself and created this.
Around them, the room changed color to a deep amber. Music began to play. It was an undulating juggernaut of keening guitars and synthesizers, a deep, swelling, expansive sound. Then the shed turned a brilliant blue. They were in a box of sky, streaked with the white vapors of clouds. Life Lines. Here were hers. She had found a way to choose her life. So must he.
“Divorce,” he said into her lap.
“I know,” she said, stroking his hair. “I knew.”
They sat outside a café near Piazza di Spagna as rosy light bathed the streets. The workday was done, and the languor of evening hung heavy in the air like pollen. After the intensity of Cleo’s art installation, it was a relief to be out in the gentle hum of public life. An ease had returned between the two of them.
“It’s lovely here,” said Frank. “I didn’t always have the best associations with Italy because of my father. But now that you live here, I’ll think of it differently.”
Cleo bit into one of the salty circles of salami that had been set before them without ceremony upon seating. Her face was glowing in the peach evening light.
“I’m glad,” she said. “He shouldn’t get to take Italy from you.”
A teenage waiter came to offer them an aperitif, clearly delighted to have the opportunity to practice his English. Frank gave Cleo a panicked look, but she ordered them two sparkling lemonades in Italian with impressive smoothness.
“I never thought I’d be able to visit Rome and not drink,” he said, as the beaded glasses were placed before them.
“Wine is the least interesting part of Rome,” Cleo said. “And of you.”
Frank gave her a defenseless smile. “Thanks, Cleopatra.”
“You’re welcome, Frankenstein.”
And there, suddenly, it was, the memory of their first Halloween together elbowing to the front of Cleo’s mind. They’d dressed up as their nicknames, Cleopatra and Frankenstein’s monster. Cleo had spent the whole afternoon getting ready, painting a golden headpiece and pinning a dress out of loose linen. She’d worn a long black wig with thick coats of coal eyeliner, transforming into her own dark twin.
“Do you remember Halloween?” she asked suddenly.
They had gone with friends to a party at Anders’s, everyone crammed into a cab, fighting over which radio station to play, the first baggie being passed around the back seat like a lover’s note.
“Of course,” said Frank. “What made you think of that?”
Cleo shrugged. Her mind still had a habit of tossing up painful memories, a reminder, she supposed, to keep moving forward. Unlike Frank, she was not prone to nostalgia.
“When I think about drinking, I have a habit of remembering the best part of every night,” said Frank, as if reading her mind. “My sponsor says this thing to me, ‘Play the tape forward.’ I have to keep remembering until I reach the point where it stopped being fun.”
“Okay,” said Cleo. “So, play it forward. You know how that night ended.”
Frank fast-forwarded to being at the Halloween party, where he had been uncomfortable in his costume, which consisted of a monster mask that smelled like chlorine. Anders was dressed, to devastating effect, as some kind of sexy murderer. Fast-forward to feeling ugly and forgotten, like an actual monster, to drinking too much, to fighting with Cleo on the way home, to the sound of her crying into the pillow as he lay beside her, watching the ceiling turn. Yes, there were the pillowcases in the morning, all tarred with black makeup that wouldn’t wash out; he’d stuffed them into the bottom of the trash, just as he used to as a child with his piss-soaked sheets, so his mother wouldn’t find them. That was why he hated to remember. Fast-forward and he always got to the dark current running beneath each seemingly happy night, to the secret sadness at the heart of Cleo that he couldn’t heal, to the black scars on the white sheets he couldn’t get out.