Read The Hotwife Summer Online
Authors: Arnica Butler
The Hotwife Summer (5 page)
July is scorching in Rome, and the days are unbearable late into the evening. By eight o'clock, though, the night has cooled, and the heat trapped in the pavement and the stone radiates to calf-height, while breezes made by the shifting temperature caress the bare legs and shift the skirts of women. It had rained in the early evening, driving everyone indoors for coffee and gelatto, and now the streets were awash in the white-sodium lights that lit up the landmarks. The red of brake lights dropped onto the slick pavement and stained it all directions.
We had had far too much wine, but the perfect amount of wine. We had opened the bottle while waiting for the rain to die down, and then we forgot what we were waiting for and drank the whole thing. I followed Summer's swishing skirt, and her bare legs, which ended in a pair of incredibly sexy heeled sandals that I could not take my eyes away from. The streets were alive with snippets of music and the sticky splashes of rain, the clatter of dishes and the disintegrating laughter and conversation that rose and fell as we passed each patio full of diners. Coffee filled my nose, then smoke, then coffee, then something terrible and foul, then a blank space where there was only the flower shop: a floral undertone, rain.
In the Foro di Augusto there were opera singers performing free in the ruins. Summer stopped to listen, leaning her arms over the edge of the wall. Her skirt got caught in the breeze and lifted high on her thigh. Her hair was loose, fluttering away in long strands. She looked ten years younger as she turned to me and smiled. “I love Rome!” she shouted.
A well-dressed young man in passing did not hesitate a nanosecond to turn on his heel and reply, “
Roma anche ti ama, bella
!” As always in Italy, the comment caused every man around to turn and look at the source of the man's affection, and the smiled in approval before returning to what they were doing.
Desire and a pang of jealousy scratched inside of me.
I pulled her by the hand to the sidewalk. “Come on,” I said, trying to sound playful. “We have a dinner date, remember?”
“Come to dinner with me,
bella
,” a man called out.
All in good fun, in Rome.
“Tomorrow!” Summer called out, winking at the man.
This met with a general murmur of approval among the group. I felt myself tugging Summer closer to me and quickening my step, even though I didn't want to. You had to remain calm with Italian men, or they sensed weakness.
Luckily it was a busy night, and we had a green light at the intersection. Summer dashed into the shining street, and I ran after her. Then men told her they loved her, and they would wait for her, and they bid her a very filthy goodnight.
We found the restaurant finally, after getting almost hopelessly lost in the narrow alleys. The fresh scent of rain and the wine we had both consumed kept our endless wrong turns from disintegrating into a fight. The evening was cool, our spirits were high, we kissed against he chipping stucco walls in quiet corners before we started looking again for the mysterious Lo Giardino restaurant.
Embarrassingly, we asked the stern headwaiter outside Lo Giardino where Lo Giardino was, and after bestowing upon us a look of contempt that he seemed to keep in reserve especially for drunk Americans, he stepped aside and waved his hand over the doorway like a magician. “
E qui
,” he said calmly. He somehow managed to make his sentence sound as if it ended with,
you fucking rube idiots.
Summer stepped back to look up at the very small rectangular sign above the door. We had passed the place several times and given it no notice, because only two tiny and uninhabited tables on either side of the door gave any indication that there was a restaurant here at all.
“I thought
giardino
meant 'garden,'” Summer confided to me in what was meant to be a whisper, but because she was so tipsy, came out much louder than she had wanted.
“There is a very nice garden in the back of the restaurant,” the headwaiter snipped. “We do not make our customers eat on the street like peasants. Do you have a booking?”
Summer tried to compose herself. “Well...I am not really sure...”
“It may be some time before we can get you in.”
We were standing in a very small lobby, beyond which we could hear the bustle of a busy kitchen, and smell the delightful food that awaited us.
I was thinking of none of these things, of course. I was thinking of the man who would fuck my wife, and what he would he would be like. I was thinking of myself, tucked away in the closet, watching him fuck her until she screamed in ecstasy.
The headwaiter gave me a curious look. I blushed.
“The thing is,” Summer said, and she was putting on her slightly dumb act, which I loved because it worked such a charm on men. The headwaiter was clearly gay, and so it made the scene even funnier for me. I folded my arms and watched in amusement. Summer was also quite tipsy, and I could tell that her American accent, the splatter of freckles on her nose, and her tipsiness, were combining to irritate the very European, homosexual headwaiter to such an extent that he might pass out. “The thing is,” she repeated, and her voice dribbled away into a honeyed laugh, “I'm meeting a class here.”
The headwaiter was impassive.
“This is not a school,” he cautioned, as though speaking to a child. He began to lean over the small podium where he kept the reservation book. “There is no class at Lo Giardino.” He almost spat as he said 'class.'
I was close to cracking up. This was too much. It was like a movie, but better.
“It's a cooking class,” Summer said, drunk enough, and in a good enough mood, to let the headwaiter's snobbery sail right through her. “It's Sandro Cervi's class, maybe he...”
Everything in the room transformed, inside out and backwards. It seemed like by some cinematic trick, I saw her lips again forming the syllables:
San. Dro. Cer. Vi
. They fell like sleet from the sky and slapped me in the face. No, my face went numb. No, my heart came to a sudden stop, colliding one final time in slow motion against my chest and then sticking there. A dull pain began to wind up slowly inside of me. My ears filled up with pressurized blood and I went deaf.
Deafened by the sound of Sandro Cervi's name, I watched the headwaiter rise from his podium, and with his rising, the features of his face transformed. The look of disdain he had been hiding only minimally until then was hastily covered up by a warm and flattering smile. His eyes lit up and his mouth formed the same syllables that Summer had pronounced:
Sandro.
Cervi
.
At the same time, my mind was attempting to console me. It could be a
different
Sandro Cervi, my mind whispered. My body wasn't listening. It was flashing hot and cold in patches, and I felt my chest constricting.
Summer was turning to me and beaming. Oblivious. The headwaiter was practically bowing as he opened the curtain and led us through the bustling restaurant, and outside to a garden. Strings of lights kept the courtyard bathed in a warm glow, but I was freezing inside.
It could be someone else, my mind kept urging me. I had to think hard to move my limbs forward, following Summer's swishing hair, her soft skin, her occasional delighted smile directed back to me. Sandro was a common name. Cervi was...probably common. This was Italy. Everyone was a chef.
It could be anyone.
It seemed like we were crossing the garden forever.
And then, Summer parted to one side, to take a seat and greet her instructor. A blond man, his face far more weathered and yet somehow more handsome than last I saw him, moved his piercing blue eyes upward.
Had he known he would see me? There was a moment – and everything seemed to hang in the air for an eternity for that moment – that I could swear his face seemed to register only what he had expected to see. A flicker of a smirk, maybe.
But he very quickly jumped, as though a snake had popped out at him in a garden. Then his geologically creased and handsome face broke into a wide smile, a cartoonish expression of surprise. He extended his arms and widened his mouth even more, looking from the perplexed Summer to the headwaiter to me, to anyone, generally, in the audience of the restaurant that was now watching his theatrics. “Benny?!” he finally shouted. “Benny, Benny Brooks!”
Ah yes. It
was
that
Sandro Cervi.
Before he was Sandro Cervi, popular and sought-after chef with three Michelin stars and more money than God, he was Sandro Cervi, my roommate. Even then, Sandro's face had been creased by his perpetual intensity: he stayed up late, he partied hard, he had a deep passion for anything that interested him and he pursued it relentlessly.
His career.
Women.
Women and more women, but specifically, other mens' women.
My women.
Specifically, one girlfriend.
I was an art history student at the American University in Rome, and while I was having grand time racking up student loan debt and not thinking about it at all, I needed a roommate. Sandro had been introduced to me by a friend.
At the time, Sandro was a cook in a tourist-trap restaurant. We were eating there in the hopes we could get some free bread and a free beer. We were lamenting our financial woes on the sunny patio when I mentioned my need for a roommate.
“I have just the guy,” Ric said.
At that moment, Sandro had been walking out of the kitchen. He was clothed in the long white apron of a kitchen cook, but in spite of what sounded like a chaotic kitchen where marinara sauce salted to American tastes was flying through the air, he was unscathed. He was a neat and tidy guy, which I instantly liked about him.
Sandro was a northern Italian; his hair was blond and his eyes were blue. There was no mistaking him for a Swiss or a German, though: there is a certain swagger, and a certain masculinity that radiate from Italian men. Sandro had it droves.
From beneath his long apron, he produced a basket of bread.
“On the house,” he said, in a crisp English accent. He had attended a boarding school in Switzerland, I would find out later, and his English was flawless. When women came around, he layered it with a creamy frosting of Italian for effect.
It worked.
“This is the guy,” Ric said.
Sandro shot out a hand and smiled his thousand-watts of clean white teeth in my direction.
The thing about Sandro is that even after all of the things that happened between us, when I remember meeting him, or remember him at all – I still have an inclination to
like
him, in a weird way. As I think of his hand and his smile and the casual way he tucked breadsticks into his pants for laughs, I still
like
him.
I shook his hand, and his handshake was firm and commanding, but friendly. He had that ease with himself and other guys (and later, I would learn, with women) that made his life a series of uncomplicated interactions with everyone.
“Sandro,” he said to me. To Ric: “Why am I the guy?”
“Ben here needs a roommate,” Ric said.
Sandro nodded, as if the deal had already been done. And in a way, it already had. Like all men and all women who met Sandro, I was under his spell. He simply said what was going to happen, and then it was done. “I'm hardly ever there, mate,” he said, his haughty British accent sliding away easily to some of-the-people variety. He jerked a thumb back toward the kitchen to explain himself.
“Where are you?” he asked me.
I explained where the cramped apartment was, in a trendy and overpriced area that was a few metro stops from here.
Sandro squinted. “Sounds good. When do I move in?”
Sandro had been true to his word: he was hardly ever home. He was neat and tidy, as his apron had suggested.
But when he was home, and our worlds collided, he was a hurricane.
There was no escaping him. Every night that Sandro was home, he dragged me out with him.
The ladies fell at his feet. There was no woman, as far as I had ever seen, who could resist his charm, his alpha-male easiness. He was like a wolf. Lopping nimbly through the packs of women that thronged at the clubs, standing aloof by the bar. Doing nothing, really – but the energy of the entire club would somehow change, as if elevated to a higher pitch, one synchronized with Sandro himself.
Within half an hour he would have five women circling round him. Not just any women – the prettiest, the hottest, the most beautiful women.
“Yeah,” Ric murmured one night, as we watched the whole thing happen in front of us and hoped for a jilted girl to latch on to one of us as a substitute. “I shoulda told you, lock up the girlfriend.”
It wasn't until many months later that it was even an issue.
Sabrina was an American girl, cool and raven-haired. She was studying art history for a year and then she was going back to America to live in a rat-infested loft where she was going to make the next
Piss Christ
if everything went her way. She was not at all Sandro's type, and Sandro was everything she insulted for hours over rum and diet cokes that she enjoyed ordering to the chagrin of every waiter in Italy. It never even crossed my mind to “lock her up.”
And then they collided.
“Ciao.”
“I'm obviously not Italian.”
Sabrina was cross-legged on my couch, and to my delight, having none of Sandro's alpha-wolf charm. She was playing video games and smoking a cigarette, and she was looking as un-Italian as any woman possibly could. Italian women had nice clothes, for one thing, and then there was the matter of her simply not
looking
Italian. Her eyes and her features, all lovely, had the softened, blended, American look to them.
There was also the bitchiness. There was European bitchiness, and there was American bitchiness. European bitchiness was of the
I'm-so-bored-while-I-give-you-this-hand-job
variety, while American bitchiness was the kind that would get fingers pointed in your eyes and lectures about post-modernist feminism.
Sandro shrugged, and disappeared into his room.
I could not have been more pleased with the interaction, because by then I was hopelessly in love with Sabrina, and her dark-haired beauty, her softness when she was alone with me, her brilliantly scary mind. I liked that she wore torn jeans in her classes, and spoke perfect Italian even though she almost never used it, and was top of her class even though she always seemed to be too tough to even go to class. She was sexy, she was fun, she was smart – and most lovely of all, she seemed completely unaffected by Sandro.
“Aggggh!” she screamed, throwing the controller across the room and covering her eyes. “I'm going to fucking crash!”
We were playing some mindless game that came with the game center a departing student had dumped in his hallway before he left. It was ten years old and pointless, and involved driving trucks into other trucks. Sabrina, endearingly, was trying to drive carefully through the game without hitting any other vehicles.
But I underestimated Sandro, and I underestimated the power of his charm. He reappeared, a moment later, in a t-shirt and jeans, which his physique turned into a magazine ad. He plopped on the couch.
“America,” he declared, and for a moment he sounded like he was going narrate a documentary. “My friend is having a party. It's a big, fun party. Let's all go.”
Sabrina uncovered her eyes and opened her mouth to explain why we couldn't go.
Sandro was looking at her. He had a talent, this guy, that I would never be able to analyze. He had, after all, just met Sabrina, a girl I had never mentioned or described. Somehow, he had composed his face into the perfect blend of humor and sensitivity, mystery and allure, domination and charm...whatever it was, whatever elements Sabrina wanted, and the exact quantities of those elements. He smiled.
“You don't like me, America,” he declared, but my stomach was already seizing up because I could that she did. “But we should not miss an excellent party just because of that. Ben....” he looked at Sabrina and paused. He was drawing her name out of her like a snake charmer.
“Sabrina.”
“Ben, Sabrina. Put on your dancing shoes, or whatever terrible thing you non-Italian people do, and let's boogie.”
Sabrina turned her head to me. She didn't implore. I didn't fight.
There were people who said things, and then the people around them just did them. Sandro was one of those people.
Sandro didn't steal Sabrina from me that night. I would never know, really, how he did it. I could see him circling in, ever-closer. He seasoned his jokes just for her. He helped her translate something with a cranky bartender. He gave her a ride on his Vespa when he saw her walking down the street to the Metro. He pulled us both into his circle with magic fingers, like he was casting a spell.
Oh, come to my restaurant. Free dinner for both of you, I'll make it something special.
It was obvious, when I looked back on it. Obvious as anything.
Sabrina loved me, of course. She told me so and we made plans to continue our relationship when she went back to New York. But something else was in her eyes while we made love, and it was Sandro. Sandro who had that dominating thing, Sandro who was so good-looking and so ambitious, Sandro who hammed up his Italian accent to charm the ladies.
I should have done something about it, but I didn't. Who can say what it was? Sandro made the men around him as powerless as the women he charmed. I saw the way that Sabrina's eyes disappeared inside of her own head when Sandro would appear in the apartment, toss his keys on the table, and disappear into his room after a brief, “
Ciao, bellisimi
.” I saw how she took his every word and gesture and tucked it away in her own mind, where she was fantasizing about him. Her eyes would gloss over, and she would no longer be paying attention.
“Mmmmhmmm,” she would murmur.
“I think I failed that test.”
“Mmmmhmmm.”
“I ate an entire spit roasted pig for lunch.”
“Mmmmhmmm.”
I knew she was dreaming of him. Thinking about him when I was trying to keep her happy in bed. I knew she listened through the walls for Sandro's voice, thinking of his superior body, his superior masculinity. He had her wrapped around his finger long before anything really happened.
When I found them, then, it was no surprise. The only surprising thing was what Sandro had convinced Sabrina to do.