Chapter Twenty-Four Rory

I’m back in Rome, swept into the crowds, anonymous. Fourteen-year-old boys on motorini whiz past, the heat far thicker than when I left it, every inch of my skin slick with sweat. My sandals crunch over green glass bottle shards that haven’t yet been swept up from the cobblestones. The throngs of tourists have soared, with the sounds of chattering English on every corner, clear American accents belting out “Ciao!” making me cringe, because as anyone who has spent enough time in Italy knows, ciao is what you say to your best friends—too familiar for a shopkeeper whom you’ve never met, for whom salve or buongiorno is more appropriate.

I hasten across the piazza, past pharmacies with their glowing green plus signs, where I’ve learned you can’t get cleaning supplies or birthday cards, only medicine. I pass little shops called bars that aren’t places to buy alcohol, like in the United States, but rather coffee and gelato shops. I pop into one for a macchiato—sit at a table and watch the world happen for a bit. There aren’t to-go cups in Italy; and so for a few minutes I stare and sip, as everything from the past couple of days swishes around in my brain. When I finish, I set the empty cup on the bar, feeling thoroughly Italian. I find myself smiling—half a year ago I couldn’t have imagined it, spending months in Rome, even knowing the culture a bit. It’s an adventure I never anticipated. Then my smile fades. I couldn’t have anticipated the other stuff, too.

It’s still so incomprehensible—that Caro betrayed me. Nate, too, yes, but my anger is more acute with Caro, to be honest. It’s more than the fact that she was my best friend, my sister. I’ve been mulling it over, dragging my tongue around this feeling I have like it’s an aching tooth that Caro has always lived in some way to please me. It’s not a fun vantage point to examine, and perhaps I’ve avoided it, because of what it says about me: that I’ve enjoyed it. Maybe it stemmed from Caro never having a solid family, that she went above and beyond to avoid harming her connection to ours. But she’s stood up for me at every turn, dropped everything to fly to California when Nate broke up with me and I lost my job. She’s whisked me away for surprise spa weekends that I wondered how she could truly afford. She’s comforted me and listened to me, to the littlest things on my mind. But Caro’s a hard person to probe, to get her to spill the littlest things on hers. For Caro, things are usually great, great, great, even when she’s sunken into debt, even when her career isn’t quite working out. It’s like she hasn’t wanted to need my help or to admit that things weren’t going swimmingly. Maybe she finds it easier to be private and upbeat, to push down her troubles, pretend they don’t exist. And I suppose I’ve had so many troubles of my own that they’ve naturally dominated our conversation these past few months. Maybe I missed signs, though, maybe I should have probed more. Because I’ve never wanted a friendship centered around me. Still, I wonder whether, like Max sometimes accuses, I do have a tendency of attracting the limelight. Whether I positioned myself as the star in our friendship, without realizing?

How could she do it, though? Stealing the books and denying it to my face when I saw the evidence with my own eyes. Sleeping with Nate. No matter that we’d broken up, it’s such a deep betrayal. And it doesn’t mesh with my friend, who is the most loyal, caring person I know.

Well, it’s unlikely I’m going to logic this thing out. Sometimes shitty things happen for no reason. Exhibit A: Papa having Alzheimer’s so young.

I leave the bar, then weave down Via Condotti. The famed shopping avenue is already bustling at ten in the morning. I pass Bulgari and Cartier, Gucci and Prada, all the luxury stores fanning out from the Spanish Steps, catching glimpses through the windows of the impeccable saleswomen wrapping items with their traditional painstaking care, where I know it would not be unusual to spend fifteen minutes waiting as they tenderly fold tissue paper and select beautiful boxes and bows. At the Barcaccia fountain, I ascend the Spanish Steps toward the church bell towers that hover over the iconic expanse. I’m in one of the most famous parts of Rome—of the world—and yet I’m in a sulky, but blessedly caffeinated, mood as I hurry toward Ginevra’s apartment.

I’ve told Gabriele I need time alone and asked him to pass it along to the others. The others being Nate and Caro, although I didn’t explain the reason to Gabriele. I’ve told Max as well, said I’ll try to meet him at the Colosseum later, where Ginevra’s arranged a group tour. We’re all scheduled for the Sistine Chapel in the morning, and the Pantheon, both of which I’ve frequented more than once in my months-long stay in Rome and am opting out of this round. Max said he wasn’t sure if he was going to join the morning tour—that he might wander Rome on his own. He looked tired this morning, his under eyes bruised half-moons, which I thoroughly understood, since I, too, passed the night in fitful sleep.

Max and I shared breakfast in his suite, a few carriages down from mine. We flaked off pastries and drank cappuccinos, speaking circles around Caro’s and Nate’s betrayal. We talked instead of Papa, how I’ll go to Michigan soon to visit, how I’m thinking about training to become a meditation teacher. Max reminded me how talented I am as an anchor, how I can’t give up everything I worked for—a speech that sits in my stomach like cement.

Worked for. I did. So hard. Maybe I want it to be easier now, I said, and he shook his head, offered me a job with his company, any job at all. I smiled. Declined. I almost told him then about Caro’s other betrayal, about the embezzlement, which she didn’t even deny, but then I didn’t. I’m saving what I know, for now. Funneling all my energy toward confronting Ginevra. I considered texting her again, giving her notice of my arrival, but I’ve decided not to. She told me, when I was her main character, to feel utterly at home in her apartment. She even showed me how to access her spare key in the lockbox in the electrical closet, in case I arrived for a session when she wasn’t yet home.

I need answers. A whole lot of answers. But will I get them? So far all I know is Ginevra has set me on a collision course on this train with the people closest to me. She has something planned for me in Positano, although I have zero clue what. She’s not going to spill all now, just before what I am starting to suspect is a carefully crafted end—will she?

On the other hand, the books have been stolen. That can’t be what she intended, especially since I know Caro took them and not some minion Ginevra hired for PR purposes. Ginevra will give me a new one, I assume. Or will she? If she’s still planning something sinister, if she was involved in that boulder crashing toward me, then I can’t take anything she says or writes at face value. Again, I remember that strange feeling that came over me after I speedily read the book. That there was something off in its pages. Was it the embezzlement or the affair—or a fact about my birth mother?

Is Ginevra my mother? It’s such a crazy notion. And if she is, will she even tell me now, before the journey she’s set me on concludes?

Truth is, I’m a little sick at what I’m considering. Hoping Ginevra will be home.

Hoping a little bit more that she won’t be.

Ginevra lives on a leafy street in a rather unassuming historical, crumbly building that you wouldn’t suspect of housing the world’s most famous author. I punch in the code, then enter to a foyer that smells vaguely of recently freshened paint. The building has no elevator—just pink marble steps Ginevra ascends, huffing like a smoker. She’s not even yet sixty, but she climbs up so laboriously that I’ve wondered if she worries that one day she will have to move to a more accessible place. More likely, I’ve thought, she’ll buy the whole building and install an elevator. She’s lived in the apartment since her thirties, she said. And she’s not a person who I imagine easily navigates change.

I take the stairs in leaps, two steps at a time. Then, once I reach the second landing, I hesitate outside Ginevra’s door with its brass lion knocker, but no other evidence—not even a nameplate—that the beloved author lives inside. Then I rap twice. I hold my breath, awaiting the heavy footsteps. The face swimming in chins. The eyes warm, but with a swampy film atop, muddying the brown. Ginevra is the type of person who looks to have lived fifty lives. Funny, I’ve always thought, that she needs main characters at all.

Authors often repackage their own traumas. I interviewed another author on air once, far less successful than Ginevra, and she told me, You can’t know your characters unless you truly know yourself.

I asked Ginevra about it, in one of our later interviews when I still had a job. About whether she agreed with the other author’s credo.

Ginevra replied, “I know myself all too well. I know pain in my deepest corners. That’s why I have main characters, because their pain doesn’t provoke me. I can remain objective. Playful. Creative. I believe that an author who exploits only her own pain—who repackages her traumas—cannot see beyond her own borders. My way of creating may be unorthodox, but no one can dispute that it works.”

It was a neat explanation, but as I stand here, I wonder if all Ginevra’s success does indeed prove that it works. And even more, I wonder about Ginevra’s pain.

Whether, somehow, its origin is me.

No answer. I’ve knocked multiple times, and Ginevra hasn’t come. I feel quite certain she isn’t home, since usually when I arrive, her throaty voice quickly signals her onset. I draw a deep breath. Am I really going to do this?

Yes. I head over to the electric closet, peer inside, then punch in the code to the lockbox. The door springs open, and I grab the key. Yes, I’m going to do this.

I quickly unlock the door. “Ginevra,” I call, stepping inside. “It’s Rory. Are you here?”

The steady hum of the air conditioner is my only reply. I walk slowly past the curved wooden benches and the bronze sculpture of a naked woman with her knees up to her chest, past the jade marble entry table on which a nineteenth-century silver candelabrum is perched.

“Ginevra?”

The air is thick with Ginevra’s signature perfume—Sophia Loren’s favorite, Jean Patou’s Joy, melding jasmine with roses. But she’s not here. I feel pretty sure of it at this point.

Am I really doing this? Am I really breaking into her place? After Caro’s? It’s becoming a pattern.

Past the foyer I go, toward the dining room, with its long black lacquer table dotted with blown-glass roosters. The curtains are pulled, so unlike my other visits here, no light flushes the space, offering even more certainty that Ginevra is out. The place is far more suffocating without daylight streaming in—like a 1960s museum to Sophia Loren, with even her photo contained in a round frame on a side table, a close-up of her lovely face from when she was in her thirties, like how you would display a lover or a child.

I hang a right toward Ginevra’s study. I’ve never been inside that room, only past the heavy wooden door on my way to the powder room. The author gave me a grand tour at the onset of my employment, even showed me her bedroom, with its eighteenth-century four-poster, painted Italian headboard, and muted pastel chinoiserie. In her closet, she unveiled the frothy custom Dior gown that Sophia Loren wore in 1966 on the set of Arabesque, and the cream embroidered dress Sophia wore in 1955 on the balcony of a Byzantine palazzo. It was the first time in all my years of knowing Ginevra that I saw her spark with genuine enthusiasm. She smiled as she told me how she bid on Sophia’s old dresses at auction, how even pieces of the furniture in the apartment had once belonged to her idol. It seemed quaint to me, if a little sad, that Ginevra lived inside a shrine to a woman she’d never met. It was a metaphor of sorts, I intuited, to her life spent spinning stories about other people—that seemingly contrary to her aged patina, to her astounding success, Ginevra must have lived so little, experienced near nil, that she needed main characters to help her craft exciting tales.

Who was Ginevra, really?I remember thinking.

I still don’t know. I’m not even sure now if she knows.

On completion of the tour, when we were back in the living area, I asked Ginevra to see her study, where her books get written—the one door I noticed she passed by without showing me inside. But Ginevra simply smiled and said, “That’s a private space, just for me. We creatives… we get quite superstitious about the things that work. And what works for me is keeping my office private.”

Now I hover outside the door, my eyes darting around for any concealed cameras. Ginevra has never seemed like a security freak, but still, she’s wealthy as all get-out. Someone of her status might collect a few stalkers or grifters, right? No cameras, though, not that I can spot.

I twist the knob, but then pause. What I’m contemplating is such an enormous invasion of privacy. What has Ginevra done, after all, other than ameliorate my career catastrophe and send me on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to boot? Try to resolve things between me and Nate with, as far as I can tell, benevolent intentions? Expose Caro’s alleged crime in a gracious, private way, leaving me the discretion to handle it as I see fit? All my other conjectures are exactly that—unproven.

But then I swallow hard, feel a sudden hardening of my resolve. I am not anyone’s puppet. Not Nate’s, not Caro’s. And certainly not Ginevra’s. I signed up for three months of being her main character. But my contract is over. I’m not her main character any longer. This is my life, and I need to regain control over the script.