Wedding Cake for Breakfast (11 page)

It wasn't practical advice. It was aspirational advice. If I had been a better, more Belle version of myself, I would look at the Prince/Beast version of him and say, “What the hell.”

• • • • • • • •

Somewhere near the end of the twelfth month, I got sick and tired of being sick and tired. And he got tired of hearing me scream and wail and cry. The fairy tale that never was gave way to faith that we should really be together. We sat down and talked about everything we had been through, and realized that even though that first year huffed and puffed, it didn't blow our marriage down. We started to remember that before there was a fairy-tale wedding, there was a friendship. Even though it didn't seem like it, we really liked each other and didn't want this roller-coaster first year to ruin it. During the conversation, he got up and left the room, coming back with his only pair of shoes in his hands. “Do you think you could show me how to buy some shoes?” he said, with that sheepish grin that I loved. As if it was totally involuntary, a hootlike noise came out of my mouth. It was so startling and unrecognizable, it was laughter. Then he laughed. And this one little gesture clicked in a release—we laughed until we cried. With all the death and destruction, I had lost an essential tool for any relationship—a sense of humor. It felt good; no, glorious. And at that moment it became the unspoken agreement that we would find a reason to laugh, every single day.

The first year was impossible. The second was hard. The third one led to parenthood for the first time. The eighth year brought us a second child. There have been deaths of parents and siblings, lost jobs, and found careers. That first year was the first rung of the ladder, the bottom stair, the starter's block. It was the once upon a time in a far faraway land of two really young people who didn't have any magic wand or playbook. We didn't know any spells. There was no wise old sage ushering us to the happy ending. It was a decision we made every day. There were some days that I'd say, “I love you,” in the morning, when all had I wanted to do was smother him in his sleep the night before. Then there were others that I would watch him sleep and be so filled with love for him, it would give me a lump in my throat. Never a dull moment.

In the end, it was more about faith than the fairy tale. It was about a belief in the voice that introduced me to my husband. I was the girl looking for the dream, learning that this one would require work and patience and love. Before him, I spent a lot of time singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.” And when he showed up, I had to learn how to love him, and to let myself be loved by him. Now every night I look at him and think about the ups and downs of our life, and every morning I think about our love and family, and am ever grateful for faith that got us through when the fairy tale wasn't enough. Twenty-nine years later, I feel like we've got the happily ever after.

 

WE ARE SO GOOD TOGETHER

Ciao, Baggage

CATHY ALTER

They just kept going around and around on an endless loop, the same red knapsack, green duffel bag, and bungee-corded brown box circling the room like refugees stuck on a Ferris wheel. My husband Karl's suitcase appeared immediately, loaded with Etro striped shirts, Ferragamo loafers, and his prized Dries Van Noten sport coat. But after two hours of waiting, frantically jumping from one baggage carousel to another as a smattering of arriving flights touched down, it became painfully clear that I would be spending the next ten days in Italy stuck with the clothes I had on my back: a BO-infused green T-shirt with a pink heart silk-screened across the front, a pair of jeans that were decorated with various in-flight meal mishaps, and highlighter-yellow slipper-sneakers. Not even my carry-on bag could save me—all it contained, besides my wallet and passport, was a handful of Dramamine, a horseshoe-shaped neck pillow, and a dog-eared copy of Thomas Mann's appropriately titled
Death in Venice.

It wasn't like this the last time Karl and I were in Italy. Two years earlier, I had an entourage of luggage when we made our way from Rome to the Amalfi coast to attend the wedding of Karl's good friends Eric and Shana. Back then, my multiple bags were jammed with everything from the filmy peignoir set I had planned to pull out on our first night in Rome to the full-length judge's robe I had volunteered to transport to Positano, a favor to the officiant (who later admitted he wanted the extra space in his own suitcase for a postwedding shopping spree in Milan). Instead of asking myself,
Do I really need all those shoes?
I told myself as I demolished my apartment in a state of packing frenzy,
You'll be ready for anything
—from a freak snowstorm to the sweltering heat that this new love held for me.

Of course, all this overzealous preparedness was probably a way of managing my anxiety, a belief that as long as I packed that pair of silk cargo pants, those fourteen tubes of lipstick, and, I'm embarrassed to admit now, a spare roll of toilet paper, I'd somehow manage to avoid another kind of travel emergency, one where my new boyfriend decided he didn't really care for my company after spending five consecutive days with his plus-one wedding date. Karl and I had been seeing each other for only a few months, and up until our Italian getaway, we had spent only a handful of weekends together, lolling around in bed or on one of our respective couches watching reruns of
Family Guy.
This trip required putting on actual clothing and remaining upright for an extended period of time, negotiating territory beyond our regular haunts in D.C., and sharing a bathroom with a handheld showerhead and a door that did not lock or do much to block out certain, er, noises. It could be, as a friend so helpfully noted the night before my departure, “a make-it-or-break-it test of our relationship.”

As it turned out, weddings in countries with sun-dappled piazzas, hushed Byzantine passageways, and copious amounts of red wine are more of the “make it” variety. I spent most of the week crying tears of insane joy. Practically everything made my heart swell to Hallmark proportions: eating fresh fruit on the tiny balcony of our room in Rome, wandering around Pompeii and giving our own made-up tour (“Over here you'll see some ancient toilets,” and “This was once considered Toga Alley”) when we strayed from the group, buying forty-ounce bottles of Peroni and drinking them on a scrubby patch of land while cars and scooters whizzed by and the sun set behind the Colosseum. “Oh crap,” I'd say every time the waterworks began. To which Karl would respond, “What have you done to me?” before cupping my face in his hands and looking at me like the romantic sap we both knew he was becoming.

I was deliriously happy because I knew what it was like to be so profoundly unhappy. Before Karl, I had been married to a guy who was so wrong for me, my parents actually phoned a week before the wedding and told me it wasn't too late to call things off. (“I could have had my eyes done!” my mother later complained, annoyed that she had forgone an eye lift in order to pay for what she called my “starter marriage.”) I spent the entire five years of marriage trying to prove everyone wrong, impressed by my fortitude even as I turned inward and old, an angry stranger to myself and a sad nuisance to friends.

But in Karl I had found someone who finally made sense. Handsome and forthright and predictable in a way that was a lifesaver after my gay-divorcée haze of bad decisions, Karl adored me for the precise reasons for which I wanted to be adored. He listened intently to early drafts of stories and laughed uproariously in all the right places. When I brought home a teaching award for distinguished professional achievement, he told me I was the prettiest genius he knew. And when my head became hot with sleepiness, he would lay his palm across its crown and say, “Sometimes I see you as a little girl.”

Is it any wonder that Italy—a boot that seemed custom-made just for us—became the embodiment of every four-hankie chick flick I had ever seen?

I bawled the hardest on our last night. Karl and I had begged out of the postwedding group trip to Capri and rushed back to Rome, our Rome, where we strolled the fancy streets near the Spanish Steps and ate dinner al fresco with the Parthenon as our background. “I don't want to leave,” I sobbed on the steps of a church, flat on my back and staring up at the stars. Returning to Washington meant reentering our real lives, held in separate beds, compromised by the demands of work and abandoned friends, a burning relationship essentially watered down on American soil. In my ideal world, Karl and I would remain joined at the hip.

“We'll come back,” Karl said, gently cradling my head against the cool church steps. “You'll see.”

• • • • • • • •

And we did come back, deciding to celebrate our first year of marriage in the country where we fell in love. It didn't escape me that the last time we were in Italy had been to witness the marriage of our friends and now we were back to celebrate our own, and I fully appreciated the trip's symmetry.

Of course, I wanted to pack accordingly. We would be kicking things off with four days in Florence, new territory for us, and wrapping things up in Rome, a welcome-back tour of our burgeoning romance. And even though I was no longer packing to manage my nutty relationship jitters—the ring on my finger pretty much took care of that—I realized that successfully subjugating that anxiety had freed up way more space in my suitcase for extra shoes, among other (plenty of other!) things.

So when we arrived in Florence and my luggage did not, I was concerned it would be hard to repeat the same romantic glow of our past trip dressed in dirty jeans and a sweat-stained T-shirt. This was not the chic image I had of myself parading up and down the Via Veneto.

“Don't worry,” Karl said as we joined the line of other passengers in similar luggageless states. “I'm sure your suitcase will show up tomorrow.”

Not to insult the way things work in Italy (Berlusconi has pretty much roped that cow), but after a lot of hand gestures and mounds of paperwork (helpfully prepared in Italian, a language I can only order in), I had little confidence that my luggage would arrive in time for our golden anniversary.

I spent my first night in Florence eating a slice of pizza on the curb and washing my underwear in the sink. “You'll see,” said Karl, happy my nightgown was still lost in transition, “we'll wake up and all your clothing will be waiting for you.”

But they weren't waiting for me the next day. Or the day after that. When I passed through the lobby in exactly the same outfit I'd had on the day before, I wondered if the beautiful pair working the front desk turned to each other and muttered unkind things about my predilection for shirts with giant pink hearts on them. Out on the streets, I felt dirty and obvious, and even though there were plenty of fanny packs and Bermuda shorts on view, all I saw was a city of Versaces and Valentinos.

But I made do, sharing Karl's toothbrush and deodorant and shampooing the ripeness out of my clothing. The hotel provided me a kit containing a plastic comb, dental floss, and a shoe chamois. There's a classic book called
Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.
Well, forget that. I was rewriting my own version, surviving on just five items a day.

Of course, Karl encouraged me to go shopping for a new wardrobe. “I'll buy you anything you want,” he said, leading me into a shop filled with crisp, neatly stacked blouses and perfectly cut linen trousers. I made a beeline for an ivory-colored shirtdress and held it against my body. I hadn't been clad in anything other than what I had on when we left Washington, and suddenly, standing in front of the mirror, I saw myself in something that was clean and pressed and pretty.

“Go and try it on,” urged Karl. “I bet it will look amazing.”

If being married to Karl had taught me anything, it was to be optimistic. His hope sprang eternal every day and his unshakable belief that everything would turn out fine in the end had an amazing effect on a born-and-bred worrier like myself. Instead of adding to my anxieties, Karl's capable hands took them away.

“I'm sure my luggage will show up tomorrow,” I told him, replacing the dress on its hook and thinking of my own perfectly amazing one, packed between my black cardigan and palazzo pants.

“Are you sick with fever?” joked Karl, using the back of his hand to feel my forehead. “You're actually refusing a new outfit?”

“If I get the dress, I'll have to get the shoes,” I countered, looking down at my sneakers. “And you know how impossible it is for me to find shoes that fit my narrow feet.”

The truth was, I was beginning to love the freedom that being clothesless afforded me. Every morning, instead of wondering what to put on, I just put on the exact same thing and spent the extra time reading the guidebook. I didn't even have a pocketbook, deciding at the last minute to pack my feedbag-size Isaac Mizrahi in my luggage. Now, instead of digging around for a compact to powder a shiny nose, I let my nose be shiny. Instead of applying lipstick after every meal, I left my lips alone. Instead of being elbow deep looking for my sunglasses, I just squinted into the sun's reflection off the Arno River. It took a day or two to get over the initial “Oh no, someone stole my bag” panic and the muscle memory of tossing my five-pound Mizrahi over my arm. But once I acclimated, I discovered there was no better feeling than crossing the Ponte Vecchio with both arms swinging light and free.

Walking around so unencumbered freed me in other ways as well. Instead of worrying about what I didn't have, I became much more aware of what I did have. Here was a guy who didn't care if my pits stank like hard cheese or my hair didn't bounce and behave. “I feel like we've known each other for years,” Karl had said early into our marriage, “and now we're just catching up.” We had spent our first year doing just that, seeing each other at our worst, me with a death-defying flu and he, immobile for weeks with a broken knee and pee bottle that needed constant emptying. We had also shared all those glorious dreams that all newlyweds surely think of: a starter house, our first family Thanksgiving, the sweet delight of a new baby.

We spent our last night in Florence eating salted bruschetta and pasta with wild-boar ragout on the terrace of a fancy restaurant overlooking the Arno. Karl took a photo of me and handed the camera across the table. The resulting image startled me. With my naked face and hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, I had unwittingly mastered a look of effortless cool. With my glass of red wine raised to the camera, I also looked ridiculously content.

The next day, on the train to Rome, I was one of the few passengers who didn't have to wrestle any belongings into the narrow overhead baggage racks. We passed the time reviewing the photos we had taken in Florence.

“You look like one of those Roaming Travelocity Garden Gnomes.” Karl laughed.

It was true. With my lone outfit, it looked like I had been cut and pasted in front of all the standard tourist attractions. There I was, the human gnome, waving in my green-and-pink T-shirt on the Ponte Vecchio, posing with pigeons in front of San Lorenzo, standing on line at the Accademia to meet the
David
.

“If my clothes don't show up soon,” I noted, “people are going to think we covered all of Italy in a single day.”

Rome was exactly as we had left it. We retraced our steps, eating dinner at Da Fortunato, the place by the Parthenon we had loved so much, window-shopping, hand in hand, along the Via del Babuino, making out among the tumbled columns of the Forum.

“Nothing has changed,” said Karl. We were sitting on plastic chairs at one of those irresistible tourist traps that line the perimeter of the Piazza Navona.

“Just like my outfit,” I quipped.

“Well,” Karl continued, pulling his chair closer to mine. “One thing has changed since the last time we were here.” He took my left hand and twirled the platinum band that encircled my ring finger. “Now you don't have to cry about going home.”

“Why's that?” I asked, although I already knew the answer.

“Because now you're stuck with me.” He winked.

I reached over and tugged on his band, which was made out of titanium and a thin band of platinum. Karl once told me he loved hearing the sound his ring made when he tapped his left hand on a hard surface.

“That's what I like best about being married,” I told him.

My luggage arrived the last day we were in Rome, looking like it had spent the week being kicked around by the American Tourister gorilla. Inside, I knew, were all the outfits I had imagined wearing—my Pucci minidresses and stacked-heel sandals, my Capri pants and boatneck sweater, my prized denim skirt and ballet flats. There were mounds of clean underwear, an army of rolled-up T-shirts, and enough scarves to start a magic act.

“My apologies for your inconvenience,” said the concierge, an earnest woman with a neat brown bun and tightly laced oxford shoes. We had come to check in with her daily with the simple shorthand of “Anything?” To which she would reply,
“Proprio niente.”
Nothing at all.